The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

212tThe experience of space and timePathBundle=:1IIIIy----j ... _-•DomainStationFigure 3.1 Diagrammatic representation of daily time-space paths accordingto Hiigerstrand (1970).question of how and why certain social projects and their characteristic'coupling constraints' become hegemonic (why, for example,the factory system dominates, or is dominated by dispersed andartisanal forms of production), and it makes no attempt to understandwhy certain social relations dominate others, or how meaninggets assigned to places, spaces, history, and time. Unfortunately,assembling massive empirical data on time- space biographies doesnot get at the answers to these broader questions, even though theIndividual spaces and times in social life 213record of such biographies forms a useful datum for considering thetime-space dimension of social practices.Consider, by way of contrast, the socio-psychological and phenomenologicalapproaches to time and space that have been put forwardby writers such as de Certeau, Bachelard, Bourdieu, andFoucault. The latter treats the space of the body as the irreducibleelement in our social scheme of things, for it is upon that space thatthe forces of repression, socialization, disciplining, and punishing areinflicted. The body exists in space and must either submit to authority(through, for example, incarceration or surveillance in an organizedspace) or carve out particular spaces of resistance and freedom -'heterotopias' - from an otherwise repressive world. That struggle,the centrepiece of social history for Foucault, has no necessarytemporal logic. But Foucault does see particular historical transitionsas important and he pays great attention to the periodization ofexperience. The power of the ancien regime was undermined by theEnlightenment only to be replaced by a new organization of spacededicated to the techniques of social control, surveillance, and repressionof the self and the world of desire. The difference lies in theway state power in the modern era becomes faceless, rational, andtechnocratic (and hence more systematic), rather than personalizedand arbitrary. The irreducibility (for us) of the human body meansthat it is only from that site of power that resistance can be mobilizedin the struggle to liberate human desire. Space, for Foucault, is ametaphor for a site or container of power which usually constrainsbut sometimes liberates processes of Becoming.Foucault's emphasis upon imprisonment within spaces of socialcomrorhas more than a little literal (as opposed to metaphorical)relevance to the way modern social life is organized. The entrapmentof impoverished populations in inner city spaces is ,a theme that has,for example, long captured the attention of urban geographers. ButFoucault's exclusive concentration on the spaces of organized repression(prisons, the 'panopticon,' hospitals, and other institutionsof social control) weakens the generality of his argument. D_Cprovides an interesting corrective. He treats S9ci;!L s2i!£."as more ;? pen to human . c eati ; it y and .. action. Walking, . he s .u ggests, defines alispace of enunCIatIOn. LIke Hagerstand, he begms hIS story at ground Wlevel, but in this case 'with footsteps' in the city. 'Their swarming Imass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined \paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together,' and SO \\create the city through daily activities and movements. 'They are not 'localized; it is rather that they spatialize' (note how different the jsentiment is from that conveyed in Hagerstand's work). The particular