The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

254 The experience of space and timemathematical unities given by Renaissance perspectivism could, fromthis standpoint, be regarded as just as totalizing and repressive as themaps.Let me follow this line of argument a bit further in order tocapture the central dilemma of defining a proper spatial frame forsocial action.The conquest and control of space, for example, first requires thatit be conceived of as something usable, malleable, and thereforecapable of domination through human acti8n. Perspectivism andmathematical mapping did this by conceiving of space as abstract,homogeneous, and universal in its qualities, a framework of thoughtand action which was stable and knowable. Euclidean geometryprovided the basic language of discourse. Builders, engineers, architects,and land managers for their part showed how Euclideanrepresentations of objective space could be converted into a spatiallyordered physically landscape. Merchants and landowners used suchpractices for their own class purposes, while the absolutist state(with its concern for taxation of land and the definition of its owndomain of domination and social control) likewise relished the capacityto define and produce spaces with fixed spatial co-ordinates. Butthese were islands of practice within a sea of social activities in whichall manner of other conceptions of space and place - sacred andprofane, symbolic, personal, animistic - could continue to functionundisturbed. It took something more to consolidate the actual use ofspace as universal, homogeneous, objective, and abstract in socialpractice. In spite of the plethora of utopian plans, the 'somethingmore' that came to dominate was private property in land, and thebuying and selling of space as a commodity.This brings us to the heart of the dilemmas of the politics of spacein any kind of project to transform society. Lefebvre (1974, 385)observes, for example, that one of the ways in which the homogeneityof space can be achieved is through its total 'pulverization' andfragmentation into freely alienable parcels of private property, to bebought and traded at will upon the market. This was, of course,exactly the strategy that so forcefully transformed the British landscapethrough the enclosure movements of the eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries, and which demanded systematic mapping asone of its accoutrements. There is, Lefebvre suggests, a permanenttension between the free appropriation of space for individual andsocial purposes, and the domination of space through private property,the state, and other forms of class and social power. Out ofLefebvre's proposition we can extract five explicit dilemmas:Time and space of the Enlightenment project 2551 If it is true that the only way that space can be controlled andorganized is through its 'pulverization' and fragmentation, then itbehoves us to establish the principles of that fragmentation. If space,as Foucault would have it, is always a container of social power, thenthe reorganization of space is always a reorganization of the frameworkthrough which social power is expressed. Political economistsof the Enlightenment period debated this problem quite explicitlyunder the opposed doctrines of mercantilism (in which the state wasthe relevant geographical unit around which spatial policy should beformulated) and liberalism (in which itwas the rights of individualizedprivate property that were paramount). Turgot, French minister ofstate and an eminent economist with physiocratic and liberal leanings,commissioned the accurate cadastral mapping of much of Franceprecisely because he sought to support private property relations, thedispersal of economic and political power, and to facilitate the freecirculation of commodities both within and without France. Colbert,on the other hand, had earlier tried to organize the French space toconcentrate on Paris, the capital, because of his interest in supportingthe absolute state and monarchical power. Both were concerned toenhance the fiscal basis of state power, but saw quite different spatialpolicies as necessary to meet that goal, because they envisaged quitedifferent relations of power between private property and the state(Dockes, 1969).2 What Enlightenment thinkers began to grapple with was thewhole problem of 'the production of space' as a political and economicphenomenon. The production of turnpikes, canals, systems ofcommunication and administration, cleared lands, and the like putthe question of the production of a space of transport and communicationsclearly on the agenda. Any change in space relationswrought by such investments, after all, affected the profitability ofeconomic activity unevenly, and therefore led to a redistribution ofwealth and power. Any attempt to democratize and disperse politicalpower likewise entailed some kind of spatial strategy. One of thefirst initiatives of the French Revolution was to devise a rationalsystem of administration through a highly rational and egalitariandivision of the French national space into 'departments' (see plate3.8). Perhaps the clearest example of this politics in action is thedesign of the homesteading system and the spatial grid for landsettlement in the United States (a product of Jeffersonian democraticand Enlightenment thinking). The pulverization and fragmentationof the space of the United States along such rationalistic lines was