The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

218 The experience of space and timethe various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retainthe treasures of former days. And after we are in the newhouse, when memories of other places we have lived in comeback to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood,motionless the way all Immemorial things are.Being, suffused with immemorial spatial memory, transcends Becoming.It founds all those nostalgic memories of a lost childhoodworld. Is this the foundation for collective memory, for all thosemanifestations of place-bound nostalgias that infect our images ofthe country and the city, of region, milieu, and locality, of neighbourhoodand community? And if it is true that time is alwaysmemorialized not as flow, but as memories of experienced places andspaces, then history must indeed give way to poetry, time to space,as the fundamental material of social expression. The spatial image(particularly the evidence of the photograph) then asserts an importantpower over history (see chapter 18).Spatial and temporal practices, in any society, abound in subtletiesand complexities. Since they are so closely implicated in processes ofreproduction and transformation of social relations, some way has tobe found to depict them and generalize about their use. The historyof social change is in part captured by the history of the conceptionsof space and time, and the ideological uses to which those conceptionsmight be put. Furthermore, any project to transform societymust grasp the complex nettle of the transformation of spatial andtemporal conceptions and practices.I shall try to capture some of the complexity through constructionof a 'grid' of spatial practices (table 3.1). Down the left hand side Irange three dimensions identified in Lefebvre's La production del'espace:1 Material spatial practices refer to the physical and materialflows, transfers, and interactions that occur in and across space insuch a way as to assure production and social reproduction. Representations of space encompass all of the signs and significations,codes and knowledge, that allow such material practices tobe talked about and understood, no matter whether in terms ofeveryday common-sense or through the sometimes arcane jargon ofthe academic disciplines that deal with spatial practices (engineering,architecture, geography, planning, social ecology, and the like).3 Spaces Fi£ representation are mental inventions (codes, signs,'spatial discoqrses,' utopian plans, imaginary landscapes, and evenIndividual spaces and times in social life 219material constructs such as symbolic spaces, particular built environments,paintings, museums, and the like) that imagine new meaningsor possibilities for spatial practices.Lefebvre characterizes these three dimensions as the experienced,the perceived, and the imagined. He regards the dialectical relationsbetween them as the fulcrum of a dramatic tension through whichthe history of spatial practices can be read. The spaces of representation,therefore, have the potential not only to affect representationof space but also to act as a material productive force with respect tospatial practices. But to argue that the relations between the experienced,the perceived, and the imagined are dialectically rather thancausally determined leaves things much too vague. Bourdieu (1977)provides a clarification. He explains how 'a matrix of perceptions,appreciations, and actions' can at one and the same time be put towork flexibly to 'achieve infinitely diversified tasks' while at thesame time being 'in the last instance' (Engels's famous phrase) engenderedout of the material experience of 'objective structures,' andtherefore 'out of the economic basis of the social formation inquestion.' The mediating link is provided by the concept of 'habitus'- a 'durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations'which 'produces practices' which in turn tend to reproduce theobjective conditions which produced the generative principle ofhabitus in the first place. The circular (even cumulative?) causation isobvious. Bourdieu's conclusion is, however, a very striking depictionof the constraints to the power of the imagined over the experienced:Because the habitus is an endless capacity to engender products- thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions - whose limitsare set by the historically and socially situated conditions of itsproduction, the conditioning and conditional freedom it securesis as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it isfrom a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings.(Bourdieu, 1977, 95)That theorization, though not in itself complete, is of considerableinterest. I shall return to examine its implications for cultural productionlater.Across the top of the grid (table 3.1) I list four other aspects tospatial practice drawn from more conventional understandings:1 Accessibility and distanciation speak to the role of the 'frictionL.4!stance' in human affairs. Distance is both a barrier t, ad a - -,..----=.'"