ancient cities

weakening the class struggle. Similarly, the specific
spatiality of the present global age that appears as
an inevitable dynamic from outside has already
been demasked by geographers like Massey as contingent,
purposely occluding possible alternative
spatializations by convening spatial differences
into temporal sequences.
Another alternative conception, suggested by
Sarah Whatmore, argues in favor of a reconfiguration
of the modern emptied spaces and society as
fluid sociomaterial networkings based on the actant
network theory. Likewise, the idea of the modern
subject as autonomous actor and antecedent to
its social relations is challenged. In contrast, agency
is reconceptualized as a relational effect, generated
by a network of different interacting components,
thus reembedding the human in the material properties
and presence of diverse others and also reembodying
the human life, recognizing its relational
position.
These efforts at deconstructing the social–space
duality try to emphasize the simultaneity of multiple
and partial sociospatial configurations and the
inescapable situatedness and contextuality of social
life. Thus, approaching the social–space relation
from a different angle, deconstruction questions the
boundaries that all identities presuppose.
Paradoxically, these deconstructions of the
binary conception of society and space, after the
spatial turn in social theory and its postulation of
mainstreaming space, imply, when taken seriously,
the loss of space as an “object” of research
by unveiling it as part of the social itself. Still, the
perspective of the mutual condition and the indistinguishable
togetherness of the social and space
forms the ground for further research and theorizing
on different forms of spatializations, multiple
spaces of trajectories as the sphere of
relations, negotiations, practices of engagement
and of social power relations as well as the
socially formative significance of spatialities,
their contradictions, breaks, and overlappings.
Thus social space may be approached from different
angles.
Katharina Manderscheid
See also Gottdiener, Mark; Gendered Space; Human
Ecology; Lefebvre, Henri; Social Production of Space;
Soja, Edward W.; Spaces of Difference
Further Readings
Society of the Spectacle
751
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La Distinction. Critique sociale
du jugement (Distinction. A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste). Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Engels, Friedrich. 1845. Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse
in England. Nach eigener Anschauung und
authentischen Quellen (The Condition of the Working
Class in England in 1844). Leipzig, Germany: Wigand.
Haraway, Donna J. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race
and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London:
Routledge.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. La production de l’espace (The
Production of Space). Paris: Editions Anthropos.
Löw, Martina. 2001. Raumsoziologie (Space Sociology).
Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.
Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism & Geography. The Limits
of Geographical Knowledge. Oxford, UK: Polity Press.
Shields, Rob 1991. Places on the Margin. Alternative
Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge.
Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies. The
Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory.
London: Verso.
Sorokin, Pitrim A. 1943. Sociocultural Causality, Space,
Time. A Study of Referential Principles of Sociology
and Social Science. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Whatmore, Sarah. 2002. Hybrid Geographies. Natures
Cultures Spaces. London: Sage.
So c i e t y o F t h e Sp e c t a c l e
Society of the spectacle is a term deployed by Guy
Debord (1931–1994) and members of the
Situationist International during the 1960s to
critique the alienating conditions of capitalist
and state bureaucratic societies. Most fully
addressed in a book with the same title, published
by Debord in France in 1967, the concept was
grounded in Marxist thought and was forged to
confront a new stage in capitalist productive
forces and the accumulation of capital in parts of
social life that had come under the sway of the
market and the commodity—or “colonized,” as
the situationists put it—and in which subjects
were increasingly rendered as passive and isolated
spectators and consumers, contemplating what
was presented to them, rather than active political