Closed Spaces: Can't Live with Them, Can't Live without Them

Abstract

Spatial assumptions, mostly taken for granted in mediated and face-to-face language use, both represent and constitute social reality. How, though, do their hidden logics work in detail? What are their respective imaginative effects and functions? And, in view of their involvement in discourses of discrimination, are they dispensable? By using the press coverage of the German reunification as a case study, I discuss the social embeddedness and maintenance of fairly traditional spatial concepts in general, and the Euclidean ‘container concept’ in particular on a theoretical level. In everyday social practice, it is argued, these concepts have both constraining and enabling implications. Their constitutive dimension, however, is often neglected in recent critical discourse animated by ‘new’ spatial imaginations such as flows, networks, folds, or rhizomes. In this respect, I argue that everyday ‘containerization’ surely (over)simplifies contingency and complexity. Yet, the ‘closed spaces’ still remain reasonable and to a certain extent, indispensable tools for making the world intelligible by identifying, organizing, and structuring complex phenomena. Hence, instead of only searching for new and ‘more adequate’ spatial representations, the everyday use of the ‘old’ ones should also remain a subject of thorough sociogeographic inquiry.

Reflexive Identity Narratives and Regional Legacies

“…As a general conclusion, noting relational space as a dominant form of contemporary spatial organisation should not negate the more particular visions of regional identity (Schlottmann ; Jones ; Antonsich ). People still believe in collective identity discourses, adapt them to their identity narratives and modify them in their lives.…”

“…; Paasi ). The ‘instrumentalisation’ of regions as competitive politico‐economic actors has suggested a categorical fix between identities and socially institutionalised structures (Schlottmann ; Antonsich ). While this development has refreshed regional discourses, regional distinctiveness often leans on recorded social memory and inherited practices that avert both complete fragmentation but also the metamorphosis of regional identities charged with discourses of permanence (Johnson & Coleman ).…”

“…), poststructuralist scholars argue that regions are porous, transitive and connected, where political agents constantly renegotiate regional discourses (Amin ; Massey ). Critical realists emphasise the actual regional particularities, the persistence of regionalism in civil society and the use of regionalist claims as a political resource (MacLeod ; Schlottmann ). While the relational‐territorial debate helps to understand forms of governance and social justice (Varró & Lagendijk ), regions are not solely adaptable, relative political constructs (cf.…”

Claiming Space, Claiming Water: Contested Legal Geographies of Water in South Texas

“…Legal constructions of social interaction claim significant scholarly attention because, as Delaney, Ford, and Blomley (2001, xix) wrote, "social space represents a materialization of power, and much of law consists in highly significant and specialized descriptions and prescriptions of the same power." Allied with a larger critical project in human geography (Blomley 2007(Blomley , 2008bSchlottmann 2008;Olson and Sayer 2009), scholars in legal geography examine discourse in legal practices to move beyond the ideology of legalism, which depoliticizes space and legitimizes actions of powerful actors (Delaney 1998, 19).…”

Geographies of Infrastructure Systems: The User's Lifeworld and Interface Design

“…Perspectively‐driven near‐far‐distinctions enable the users to communicate their spatial relations by deictic expressions such as ‘I’, ‘here’ and relational expressions (‘over there’). Thus, certain principles of spatial language and cognition can be identified (Lakoff & Johnson 2003 [1980], Schlottmann 2008): for example, ‘near’ equals ‘relevant’/‘familiar’/‘similar’, while ‘far’ equals the opposite ‘irrelevant’/‘unknown’/‘different’. Though such common cognitive schemata are applied routinely they seem to become less adequate in an increasingly global and technological age.…”