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Moving Through Modernity

Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism

Intro

• “resistant narratives attempt the rewriting of imposed cartographies”
• Let’s look at geography and modernism, not postmodernism; and of course people have for a long time looked at urbanness of modernity
  • Ex.: Ford Madox Ford, 1905, The Soul of London, says “We live in spacious times.” (it’s his impressionistic take on London)
  • Ex.: Wyndham Lewis’ Time and Western Man (1927) is about modernists being too obsessed w/time and ignoring space in their narratives
• his topic: “space, geography and movement, in modernist writing from 1910 to 1939” 2
• Potential problems
  • Metaphors of space: it’s a problem b/c it makes you tend to see space as an inert container
    • Who says this? Geographer Neil Smith: “the use, in certain theoretical discourses, of spatial metaphors – such as mapping, margins-centre, deterritorialisation, or location – operate at the expense of analysing the material spaces of, for example, the city” so space as “empty containers in which all objects or events can be located”
    • Smith: instead, metaphorical and material meanings of space are “mutually implicated;” and indeed space is ”’social space,’ produced according to social aims and objectives, and which then, in turn, shapes social life”
    • Thacker: “modernist texts are creating metaphorical spaces that try to make sense of the material spaces of modernity”
  • Be specific about space; talk not just about say the city, but internal and external spaces (body is a space, but so is a house, a city), and about specific spaces (specific stations, cafes…)
    • And then ask yourself if this representation affirms or contests the “official representations of space” 4
  • Relation of space and modernist form: we need to see how “social spaces dialogically help fashion the literary forms of the modernist text”
    • Joseph Frank’s spatial form stuff: “space is conceived as the spread of text upon paper and page, or the narrative pattern of a text read through time…no real discussion of social space”
      • so his approach needs some help: let’s connex spatial form with you know spaces
    • “how social space intrudes upon the construction of the literary space of the modernist text”
  • His Own New Shiny Definition: “textual space” “this interaction between spatial forms and social space in the literary text”
• So basically there’s a literary geography in its infancy and he wants to be the basic theorist of it: “such a literary geography would seek out the historical links between modernism and the production of particular material spaces in modernity” 5
• Topics
  • Howards End: suburbs growing
  • Imagism: the underground
  • Ulysses: imperial historical geography of Dublin
• What about “inner space?”
  • Cf Freud’s topology of the mind On Metapsychology
  • Stream of consciousness as “psychic spaces of character” 5
  • And its relation to external space, inside outside boundary, and how external space might affect internal space: he looks at this in Joyce, Woolf, Rhys
• Gendering of space, the gaze and the city
• Imperial space (Forster, Rhys) – spatial relations as power (Said pointed this out: relations between space enact and signify relations of power; and so did Foucault 1977history of spaces would be history of power, both on large scale and on small scale)
• National space (Forster’s countryside)
• On Keeping Separate
  • “a desperate desire to maintain borders and boundaries: rooms bleed into streets, anguished minds migrate overseas. What this produces in the modernist text sis that keenly felt sense of disorientation”
  • where for example Peter Walsh walking in the streets: his “psychic speculations” are “superimposed” on the city street in such a way as to highlight imperialism’s London connex
• Modernism is about diverse number of spaces, moving between them, and finding a form to represent your experiences with space
  • hence signif of transport: and modern systems of it: car, electric bus, underground
• So, he really wants to emphasize moving back and forth among spaces, “multiple sorts of space” 8
  • “transportation emphasised a sense of movement that came to be a crucial figure for the experience of modernity itself”

Sources

• Jameson’s “cognitive map” stuff in Postmodernism derived from urban geographer Kevin Lynch
  • of course Jameson associates space with postmodern, time with high modernism
• Said, Culture and Imperialism, “a kind of geographical inquiry into historical experience,” “the struggle over geography” (in Thacker’s terms) “crucially infuses the culture forms with imperial power”
• Geographers Derek Gregory, Doreen Massey, and Steve Pile, adapting Foucault, Lacan, D & G
• Moretti’s “literary geography”
• David Harvey, “modernity is about the experience of progress through modernization, writings on that theme have tended to emphasize temporality, the process of becoming, rather than being in space and place” (Condition of P)
• Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies, “the reassertion of space in cultural geography entails that we situate the spaces and places we examine within strong historical frameworks…Social space, as Soja argues, is dialectically related to history and time, and any reassertion of spatial concepts should not be simplistic privileging of space over time.” 5
• Two critical literary geography methods:
  • Paul Carter, “spatial history” The Road to Botany Bay
  • Kristen Ross, “synchronic history” The Emergence of Social Space (on Rimbaud)

Example to help my Uneven Devpt Question

• “The impact of the motorcar, for example, was proounced: one early commentator proclaimed that the motorcar ‘will revolutionise the world…All our conceptions of locomotion, of transport, of speed, of danger, of safety will be changed.’ Arists and writers were quick to recognise the revolution in modern transport.” 7
  • he doesn’t critically look at this source: b/c it’s nonfiction, it must represent reality
  • this commentator has clearly used future tense, where Thacker’s next sentence reveals that he ditches this futurity and assumes that the commentator was describing the present after all.
  • thus it’s a mixture of not paying attention to what the person truly says, and believing them to represent reality; one second you trust them, the next you don’t
  • and then of course this leads him to talk about Futurists…and no one’s paying attn to the name! future-ists
• ex two: Eliot: “internal combustion may already have altered our perceptions of rhythms”
  • you are ignoring the subjunctive tense and that “already” which means that he recognizes that the more obvious idea is that change will come slowly or later
• We are forgetting that modernists talking about modernity is talking about an imaginary modernity. Stop assuming that the modernity they were reacting to was one that was unilaterally uniformly there.

Chapter one: “theorising space and place in modernism”

• Space v place
  • space: “sense of movement, of history, of becoming”
    • movement
  • place: “static sense of location, of being, or of dwelling”
    • location
  • One isn’t simply revolutionary and the other simply conservative; mordernism “oscillates” between these two senses
• Heidegger, 1951 “Building, dwelling, thinking”
  • place where space v place distinction is made
  • “to be human…means to dwell” that is, being human means emplacement
    • we ARE b/c we persevere at the same place, that is b/c we persist in space
      • being itself implies place
    • hence place is not external to the human: “Man’s relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is nothing other than dwelling”
      • and true space is dwelled in space
  • against abstract (mathematical or scientific) space
  • Critique of Heidegger
    • b/c privileges static place over space, and place is remaining in one place, seems to deny history and social interaction; place is fixed and static, not changeable
• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 1958
  • psychoanalysis plus phenomenology
  • “a phenomenological study of the intimate values of inside life” – Bachelard
  • the small concrete spaces of the house, esp “the house in which the child first comes to consciousness” 15
    • “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home”
  • cellar, attic, wardrobes, corners, etc
  • wants to describe not the house exactly but instead “the primary function of inhabiting,” a study he calls “topoanalysis”
    • topoanalysis: where house becomes home, w/a sense of pleasure and belonging, which will reveal “the topography of our intimate being”
  • antipositivism: space “that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject othe measures and estimates of the surveyor.”
  • really wants a poetry of space (his examples, many from poems) and a space filled w/memories and dreams: an attitude Thacker calls “topophilia”
    • which can be a problem b/c he only sees benign space whereas for Thacker what about uneasy space? conflictual space?
  • still prefers “place” to “space”
  • “the house as a kind of body” (Thacker’s words) 15 b/c that’s where the psychic parts and traces of you are
  • “quite simple images of felicitous space”
  • nothing about exterior spaces: streets? parks?
• Lefebvre The Production of Space 1974
  • “a vital theoretical text for recent cultural geography” 16
  • Lefebvre’s “social space” is “designed to introduce questions of society, history and politics into thinking about space”
  • space over place
  • Space
    • not abstract, not the “geometrical meaning” the “simply that of an empty area” (came from Descartes, even infl humanities and social sciences not just sciences)
    • “space is never empty: it always embodies a meaning”
  • Space is produced by social practice: here he expands Marx’s observations on the way capitalism changes the landscape and generalizes it for every social practice
    • Space and society dialectically related (Soja’s term: socio-spatial dialectic”
      • Each society creates its own distinctive type of “space” (the polis, the metropolis, the city-state, etc)
      • Each space shapes society
• “Any space implies, contains, and dissimulates social relationships” (92-3 in PS)
• “Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies. There is an ideology of space.”
• Similarity to Commodities: “The production of space can be likened to the production of any given particular type of merchandise”
• Thacker: Lefebvre shows that “social space is inherently composite, mingling heterogeneous spaces together in one physical location” 18
  • 87 in PS: “Social spaces interpenetrate on another and/or superimpose themselves upon one another. They are not things with have mutually limiting boundaries.”
  • Just b/c you have walls or barriers, doesn’t mean space is fragmented totally b/c it is cut off but then again still “fundamentally part of that space” which L calls “ambiguous continuity”
• Thacker compares the heterogeneous nature of spaces in Lefebvre to Bakhtin’s heteroglossia (in language)
• What is the shape of space? L: “individual entities and peculiarities, relatively fixed points, movements, and flows and waves – some interpenetrating, some in conflict, and so on” (PS 88)
  • flows? instead of this solid looking house, really it’s a collex of streams: like energy: gas, light, radio
    • instead of static space, you have “an image of a complex of mobilities, a nexus of in and out conduits” PS 93
    • so what you get isn’t an independent entity, but one traversed by social political economic etc
  • Place? For L, “place” is one of the social discourses about space
  • Space is political
  • Three Levels
    • ”Spatial practices refer to the multiple activities that form spaces in each society”
      • space being produced and reproduced
      • people acting in space, moving across space
      • “What people do in space”
      • “experienced spaces”
      • can show evidence of people living in diff types of space: representation of and representational
    • ”Representations of space are linked to official relations of production and order; this is space as perceived by planners, architects, and governments, and is the dominant space in any society.” 20
      • maps, diagrams, construction schemes
    • ”Representational spaces embody space as imagined by inhabitants, and is often linked to artists and writers, and the ‘the clandestine or underground side of social life’”
      • “dominated…space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate”
      • via symbolic action and art
      • “is alive: it speaks” and has affect, action, and time PS 42
  • He says to apply representational space to modernist writers who attempted to capture the new spaces of modernity in their works” 20
    • but that is odd to me b/c “capturing” the new space and REIMAGINING it are two diff things (he does admit that some might accept the official space while others might defy it: the ex. is Bauhaus, which uses the official stuff to make a new architecture)
  • We should use compare material spaces w/the representations of space and representational spaces
  • He points out what L’s conception of modern space is: abstract space, “a representation of space from the eighteenth century onwards that wishes to homogenise social space. Abstract space is formal and quantitative, and functions by regarding space as an object filled with materials”
    • abstract space “relies upon geometry; a stress upon a ‘logical of visualization,’ where the visual gaze predominates over any other sensual feature of the human body; and a desire to fill the empty homogenized space it desires with what Lefebvre calls a ‘phallic-verticality, an expression of masculine violence associated with bureaucracy and the state.”
      • “Picasso’s space heralded the space of modernity” and thus the representation of space of modernity
• Foucault
  • Spatial organization is both material and metaphorical, for ex, panopticon is “simultaneously a material presence and a trope for the gaze of disciplinary power in modern societies” 23
  • Soja on Foucault: F is “spatialization of history” history “entwined with the social production of space”
  • Space is where power happens
  • Foucault on heterotopias: “the space in which we live…is a heterogeneous space. In other words we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things”
    • our spaces now: “sets of relations that delineate sites”
    • heterotopia: “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites…are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted”
      • mirror is heterotopia b/c contains real and unreal space (where reality is constructed via path through unreality): Thacker “a movement between the real and the unreal; it is thus a site defined by a process, the stress being upon the fact that it contests another site” 25
    • Thacker’s point: “heterotopias function and make sense only in relation to other forms of space.” which show the unreality of the supposedly “real” spaces they are subverting, or they compensate for the messy other world
    • Thacker: the other time Foucault used the term: The Order of Things, 1966 (one yr before the present essay), on Borges, where heterotopia is “a form of writing that undermines the idea of such an ordering of knowledge:” “dessicate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar as its source” qtd 28
    • Genocchio on heterotopias: “inscribe instability into a given spatial order”
    • Heatherington: what’s important is “not the spaces themselves but what they perform in relation to other sites” (I say that’s silly)
    • Thacker: heterotopias not necessarily freeing or revolutionary; Foucault’s power not simplistic in that some spaces have the power button “off” and others “on” so we need to see the “ambivalent” power relations in modernist heterotopias
    • Thacker wants to locate modernist heterotopias…
• De Certeau
  • Takes Foucault’s model of dispersed, anonymous power and applies it specifically to spaces
  • And his “spatial stories” give us a link between narrative and social practice
  • Each narrative about space has a mixture of tour (person through space) and map (static place, totalizing tableau)
    • Thacker wants to say that modernists emphasize the tour, realists the map (so simplistic)
  • Notes how stream of consciousness and the way it represents space makes for an actualization of space, rather than just a representation of it
• Harvey
  • Harvey’s space-time compression, in Harvey’s words: “speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us”
  • begins w/capitalism: “the need, first analysed by Marx, to constantly revolutionise economic production by the use of new technologies and practices in order to extend and maintain profits” which leads to modernization
  • modernity: “the accumulated experiences of these changes” (the changes of modernization)
  • modernism, for Harvey: “a troubled and fluctuating aesthetic response to conditions of modernity produced by a particular process of modernization”
  • Thacker: the chapter “Time-space compression and the rise of modernism as a cultural force” is super important
    • Says that one strain of modernism “reacted to the anxieties produced by time-space compression by encouraging an ‘identification of place’ that was ultimately conservative, nostalgic, and linked to reactionary political programmes such as Fascism. Drawing upon Nietzsche and Heidegger, Harvey associates place with a conception of being, while space is linked ot a notion of becoming.”
  • Harvey says “birth of modernism after 1848” as “a protest against the practical and theoretical rationalization of space and time in Enlightenment thought”
    • Capitalism = European space is more unified, esp during 1850-1900
      • “massive long-term investment in the conquest of space” in railways, telegraph, steam shipping, radio, imperialism: deterritorialization b/c “stripped of their preceding significations, and then reterritorialized according to the convenience of colonial and imperial administrations… The map of domination of the world’s spaces changed out of all recognition between 1850 and 1914.”
    • Space and time now feel different b/c of train, speed, etc
  • Harvey’s Three Ways of modernism making parallel differences in modernity, reacting to time-space compression
    • Realist narrative: “came under duress towards the end of the century”
      • its linear scheme “unsustainable in a world where events did not necessarily occur in consecutive time”
      • realist narrative “structures were inconsistent with a reality in which two events in quite different spaces occurring at hte same time could so intersect as to change how the world worked” cf Ulysses’ “Wandering Rocks” 18 diff perspectives given for a set of events
    • Interiority: “outside of rationalized exterior spaces of modernity which eradicated local differences between various groups and people”
      • “Harvey argues that the space of ‘the body, of consciousness, and of the psyche’ had been repressed by ‘the absolute suppositions of Enlightenment thought.’ Now, however, ‘are opening up…as a consequence of psychological and philosophical findings” such as interiorised spaces could ‘be liberated only through the rational organization of exterior space and time.’
      • But now rationality doesn’t mean map, chronometer, but instead relativism and perspectivism will let them invent new techniques: where “to maximize individual liberty and welfare” used “efficiency and function…as its central motif”
    • “growing sense of the importance of locale and the uniqueness of place”
      • where being (the spatialization of time) wins over becoming (the annihilation of space by time)
      • Harvey’s worried about that b/c it’s a kind of “local identity” that’s easily convertible to the nationalism that leads to dangerous aestheticization of politics
  • Me: Harvey also suggests that the reason why fragmentation came along is b/c society became more unified and so that fragmentation is an invention designed to react to TOO MUCH unity (271) “Social identity and action” could arise from fragmentation
    • for example, Harvey says Simmel writing about ruins: “the past with its destinies and transformations has been gathered into this instant of an aesthetically perceptible present” where ruins “ground” Simmel’s sense of history
  • Harvey, 275-6 to talk about fascism: how modernism always between universal and particular, how flirts w/nationalism, 279 ‘heroic modernism’, 282

Thacker Thesis?

• “Modernism as a set of responses to changes in the material spaces of modernity”
  • My critique: his examples are kind of simplistic: wow, you need the Underground to write “In the Station at the Metro”
• Modernism as having “twin poles” “identification of place and actualization of space” 40 (but actualization is kind of vague; here he means a de Certeau like working through space, consciousness intertwined in space)
• Mix of spatial form and material spaces of history

Note

• I don’t know if Thacker understands everything people are saying, ex. about Lefebvre on heterogeneity of space: he doesn’t seem to get the types of spaces on top of one another at same time