Social maps, cartograms, diagrams. Alternative cartographies entailing a radical
political commitment, aiming at mapping out the structure of capital or the
body of the movement. Where do these cultural objects come from? Where can
we find the cultural references to understand the work of Josh On, of Hackitectura,
of Bureau des Etudes or of the Beehive collective? Part of this answer can
be retrieved in a series of ‘spatial preoccupations’ that have
been emerging in neo-marxist theory, between the 70s and 80s, through the work
of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Fredric Jameson. From this debate contemporary
space emerges as something that can hardly be read relying on traditional geographic
terms, since it comprehends a series of global networks and processes that
tend towards a global and abstract level, in doing so undermining our possibility
of orientation. The arising of new forms of maps representing society, politics
and economy seems to match such concern for a space that has become “illegible” but
that has nonetheless to be understood in order to develop radical political
action. In this article I wish to give an overview of the Marxist debate about
space, trying to link a series of concerns that have emerged through it with
the current emergence of new forms of maps in the culture of the “movement
of the movements”.
The production of space
Henri Lefebvre was the first to catch the role of space as a stage of domination
of capitalist power. He was also the first to argue for a “science of
space”, a system of knowledge for the comprehension of spatial relations
and forms of social construction of space. In its major work relating to this
issue - The production of space - the French philosopher has extensively argued
how the spatial dimension is the one in which relations of social production
and reproduction are displayed. Space is nonetheless not a given coordinate,
a fixed environment in which society acts, but the object of a continuous production
and reproduction that shapes human activity that in turn shapes it (Lefebvre:
1985: 67).
Lefebvre aims at redefining the notion of space by underlining the difference
between the “social space” and the “mental space”,
the one conceived by philosophers. In doing so he reasserts a Marxist vision
of space that intends to focus on the former term. As Shields tells us in
respect to Lefebvre’s understanding of social space:
First, social space is the location of the reproduction of relations of production and of ‘society’ in all its complexity. Second, the internal contradictions of capitalism have been managed through the development of a mediating system of spatiality and of modes of occupying geographic space. (153)
The spatial model proposed by Lefebvre consists of a trialectics of “spatial
practices”, “representations of space” and “spaces
of representation” (23). The first term comprehends the actualisations
of the space of social reproduction and labor, the space where the society
can act and modify its environment. The second term indicates the discursive
regimes of analysis, spatial and planning professions and expert knowledge
that conceive of space (l’espace concu). Finally the third term describes
the context of symbolic spatial creation, of exploration as well as of representation
of the environment (25-27). Through this model Lefebvre shows how a modification
in one of the terms influences a modification in the others. Culture, sociality
and materiality are part of an interwoven system that continually produces
and reproduces space.
The space of global capital: fragmentation and abstraction
Lefebvre’s idea of the production of space can be fruitfully used to understand how contemporary space is profoundly shaped by the intervention of capital. In this context capital acts as an agent of fragmentation and abstraction. There is much consent among different scholars belonging to neo-Marxism such as David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Fredric Jameson and ultimately Manuel Castells that contemporary capitalist mode of production endorse a project of fragmentation of society and class (Harvey, 1999: 56, 2002: 34, Jameson, 2002: 56, Lefebvre, 1984: 45-67). Something that in the contemporary context can be seen in the spread processes of externalization and relocalisation as the ones analysed by Castells and Dyer Whiteford (134-136). In this context different nodes of decision, production and consumption shift away from each other. Such process is not self-standing, but goes hand in hand with overarching centralising. As Lefebvre argues:
Under its homogeneous aspect, space abolishes distinctions and differences among them that between inside and outside, which tend to be reduced to the undifferentiated state of the visible-readable realm. Simultaneously this same space is fragmented and fractured, in accordance with the demands of the division of labor and of the division of needs and functions, until a threshold of tolerability is reached or even passed […] (1987: 355)
Lefebvre considers this ambiguity of the space of capital as one of its main contradictions. A contradiction that subsumes the one between centre and periphery where “compactness and density are a ‘property’ of centres; radiating out from centres, each space, each spatial interval, is a vector of constraints and a bearer of norms and values” (356). In this context fragmented and global space are the two sides of the same space, that space that Lefebvre defines the abstract space:
Abstract space is measurable. Not only is it quantifiable as geometric space, but, as social space, it is subject to quantitative manipulations: statistics, programming, projections. […] And yet in the end the qualitative successfully resists resorptions by the quantitative – such as use resists resorptions by value. (352)
Fragmentation as a feature of capitalist space is not a surprising one. It perfectly couples with Marx’s observations about the division of labor. Dyer-Witheford observes how in the contemporary context the division of labor takes place on an international scale where “capital both flees from and undermines strongly organised, and consequently costly, strata of working-class power- metropolitan, male, industrial-by gaining access to more vulnerable sectors-peripheral, female, domestic cheapened by destitution and authoritarian disciplines” (335). This division of space on an international scale concurs with a fragmentation of space on both a global and local level. Lefebvre notes that the “whole of space is increasingly modeled after private enterprise, private property and the family”, all context that tend to fragment or “pulverize” the spatial dimension. The fragmented condition of space testifies its incorporation of social practices, since “sociopolitical contradictions are realized spatially. The contradictions of space thus make the contradictions of social relations operative” (364). The resulting fragmented space is an historical product whereby “the basis and foundation of the whole is dissociation and separation” (366).
The upper-end of the process of fragmentation, according to Lefebvre, has to be found in global power logics, that tends towards centralisation:
Dispersion and subdivision, often carried to the point of complete segregation, are controlled and dominated by strategic aims, by wills-to-power of the highest order in terms both of the quantity of means employed and of the quality of goals pursued. Everything that is dispersed and fragmented retains its unity, however, within the homogeneity of power’s space. (365).
According to Lefebvre power responds to logic of command that has in division
its strategic tool. Power is then in this context what “divides and keeps
in a state of separation” (358). The homogeneity of a space otherwise
completely disjointed is to be found only in the forms of violence that govern
it and that are at the base of its fragmentation. David Harvey shares this
understanding of space, being both global and fragmented. By examining the
project for the control of space started with the Enlightment he notes how “the
only way that space can be organised and controlled is through its ‘pulverization’ and
fragmentation” (255). In a context where space began to be constructed
as “universal, homogeneous, objective and abstract” homogeneity
could only be achieved through “freely alienable parcels of private property,
to be bought and traded at will upon the market” (254).
Lost in capital: space saturation and space – time compression
The global space of capital is, according to Harvey and Jameson in particular,
endowed with confusion, disorientation and saturation. While Harvey’s
argument is to be mainly read in relation to what he terms space-time compression,
Jameson’s analysis stems from his vision of a discontinuous space that
appears to be more and more alienated.
In the essay Cognitive Mapping contained in the collection Marxism and the
Interpretation of culture (1988), Duke’s professor argues that postmodern
space “involves the suppression of distance […] and the relentless
saturation of any remaining voids and empty places” (1988: 351). In
this context the postmodern subject is “exposed to a perceptual barrage
of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations
have been removed” (ibid.).
Jameson sees such postmodern space as the last step in an evolution of the space of capital. The first phase took place with “classical or market capitalism”, and it entailed “a reorganization of some older sacred and heterogeneous space into geometrical and Cartesian homogeneity” (349). The second phase, the “stage of imperialism”, was characterised by “a growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience” (350). To explain such condition Jameson advances the example of a daily experience of the London of the imperialist period. He argues that the comprehension of such event can’t be limited to an understanding of the city itself:
The truth of that limited daily experience […] lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life. (349)
Reflecting this intermediate phase the postmodern space proper is a “multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities” (351) in a context in which the subject undergoes a “fragmented and schizophrenic decentering and dispersion” (Ibid.). By considering Kevin Lynch’s work on the alienation in the modern city and Althusser’s notion of ideology, Jameson sees space as the scene of a “gap between the local positioning of the individual subject and the totality of class structure in which he or she is situated, a gap between phenomenological perception and a reality that transcends all individual thinking or experience” (353). To overcome this condition Jameson makes a call for an aesthetic of cognitive mapping able to provide a spatial analysis of the social structure (Ibid.)
Harvey instead interprets the condition of disorientation that epitomizes
postmodernity with what he terms “time – space compression or “annihilation
of space through time” (282). According to him “the transition
to flexible accumulation was in part accomplished through the rapid deployment
of new organisational forms and new technologies in production” (284).
This process produces a condition in which “the world suddenly feels
much smaller, and the time horizons over we can think about social action becomes
much smaller” (1988: 123).
In different occasions Harvey has investigated the intervention of capitalist
economy on space. In particular for him “the imperative to accumulate
consequently implies the imperative to overcome spatial barriers” (243).
A key role in this development is assigned to the construction of means of
transportation that enhance the speed of exchange of goods and support movements
of capital and laborers. Capital engage in a play with space that is not
free from contradiction, since the same space that was produced can proves
as an obstacle for new production.
In the context of flexible accumulation in particular, the production of
space by capital appears to accelerate the process of fragmentation and division
of both society and the space she lives in:
Capital flight, deindustrialization of some regions, and the industrialization of others, the destruction of traditional working class communities as power bases in class struggle, become leitmotifs of spatial transformation under more flexible conditions of accumulation (293).
Both reflecting and reproducing this situation “time-space compression always exact its toll on our capacity to grapple with the realities unfolding around us” (306). The rapidity with whom communication and money flows move around the abstract space of capital, creates a sense of disorientation testified by the inability for long-time planning and collective action.Looking for orientation: the aesthetics of cognitive mapping
How can we deal we such a fragmented and abstract space produced by global capital? What tools can we think of in order to grasp its shape? Fredric Jameson provided an insightful suggestion in his call for an “aesthetics of cognitive mapping”. A proposal that arises in the essay Cognitive mapping and that is elaborated in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of late Capitalism By using this definition Jameson intends to propose a pedagogical form of expression, to help understanding and navigating the space of late capitalism. The call represents a sort of Manifesto to urge artists to deal with the problematic and obscure character of contemporary space. In fact, according to Jameson, the development of cognitive mapping practices would be “integral part of a socialist politics” (1988: 356).
[…] the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable mode of representing this last in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individuals and collective individuals and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial as well as social confusion. (Jameson: 54)
Cognitive mapping would allow a “situational representation on the part of the individual subject of that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structure as a whole”. (51) In face of a context of dispersion and fragmentation in space “…cognitive mapping may be identified as a more modernist strategy, which retains an impossible conception of totality whose representational failure seemed for the moment as useful and productive as its (inconceivable) success”. (409)
His interpretation becomes problematic when one intends to link his notion of “cognitive mapping” with a series of cultural objects defined as maps. “Mapping” - Jameson states – “has ceased to be achievable by means of maps themselves” (408) And again “cognitive mapping cannot (at least in our times) involve anything so easy as a map […] once you knew what “cognitive mapping” was driving at, you were dismissed all figures of maps and mapping from your mind and try to imagine something else” (409). Jameson indeed repeatedly underlines that what he means with such term has not do with maps or at least “not in out times” (410).
Jameson’s skepticism about the possibility to develop cognitive mapping
practices through maps reflects the difficulty to translate his epistemological
project in concrete tools and practices. In his position has in any case to
be read an overall call for new political artistic practices able to represent
the space of global capital through a series of ‘mappings’ that
have not compulsorily to be actualised into the map form . The arising of a
wide range of radical cognitive maps in contemporary visual art and net.art
as in activists groups belonging to the so-called movement of the movements
seems nonetheless to show that may be the time has come for politically committed
forms of cognitive mapping to be incorporated in actual “external” maps.
The “social maps” produced by artists and activists belonging to
the galaxy of altermondialism seem to perfectly match a longstanding concern
for space as the theatre of capitalist oppression. These maps are epistemological
tools, interpreting a project of orientation in the complexity of a transnational
world, whereby the possibility to map out both the structure of capital and
the body of the “lively alternative growing within it” (Hardt,
Negri, 2000: 12), becomes the preliminary step for the imagination and finally
for the construction of “another world” that “is possible”.
In this context the marxist debate about space developed by Lefebvre, Harvey
and Jameson provides an unmissable cultural reference both to understand the
existing social maps and to imagine new forms of maps and mappings.
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