The words and the things
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12580321 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marcelo Lopes De Souza (0000-0002-7398-3170, Schlumberger (Ireland), corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 73-77 |
| Publication date | 2011-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | City (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1360-4813 • E-ISSN: 1470-3629 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13604813.2011.539022 |
| OpenAlex | W2045910858 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 7 |
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements For criticism and stylistic improvements, I am grateful to Andrea Gibbons. Notes 1 ‘[...] In what sense can an individual be autonomous? [...] The autonomy of the individual consists of another relationship which is established between the reflexive instance and the other psychic instances, as well as between ones present and the history in the course of which one has made oneself as one is, allowing one’s escape from the servitude of repetition, to reflect about oneself, about the reasons of one’s thoughts and the motives of one’s actions, guided by the intention of truth and the elucidation of one’s desire. [...] Can I say that I put down my own law—if I necessarily live under the law of society? Yes, in one case: If I can say, reflexively and lucidly, that this is also my law. For me to be able to say that, it is not necessary that I approve it: It is enough to have had the real possibility of participating actively in the proposing and implementation of the law. The possibility of participating: If I accept the idea of self‐government as such (not only because it is “good for me”), which, evidently, no “demonstration” can oblige me to do, and neither can it oblige me to choose my words according to my actions, the indefinite plurality of individuals belonging to society conducts immediately to democracy, as the actual possibility of equal participation of all, in the instituting activities as well as in the explicit power [...]’ (Castoriadis, 1990 Castoriadis, C. 1990. “‘Pouvoir, politique, autonomie’”. In Le monde morcelé—Les carrefours du labyrinthe III, Paris: Seuil. [Google Scholar], pp. 133–134). 2 Understandably, (human) geographers have tried to influence (or at least to benefit themselves from) the highly celebrated ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences in recent decades by means of proposing an ontological status for space which breaks with those traditional views (common both among philosophers and among social scientists other than geographers) according to which space is subordinated to time and at the end of the day an epiphenomenon. Some geographers have then built an approach to society in the framework of which the concept of ‘space’ becomes almost a substitute for the concept of ‘society’ (and of ‘social relations’). In Soja’s case we see an alternative path, but this is notwithstanding a problematic one too: he separates ‘the spatial’ from ‘the social’, and afterwards he tries to articulate each other with help of a ‘socio‐spatial dialectic’: ‘[...] not only does the social comprise the spatial, it is also comprised by it’ (p. 5). Unfortunately, this ‘dialectic’ implies a reductionism, and more: a mechanical one. Of course, if social relations produce material space (and to some extent correspond themselves to space regarding its immaterial dimensions, such as in the case of territorialisation processes or the construction of a ‘sense of place’), space somehow ‘comprises’ social relations, as much as space (material space as well as boundaries and territories, images of place and spatial identities) conditions/influences (but not ‘determines’) social relations. In order to admit this, however, is by no means necessary to implicitly deny that (social) space exists only in the context of society as a concrete totality, instead of being something like a parallel structure for whose investigation one could or should legitimately claim a clear epistemological autonomy. Social relations and space certainly imbricate each other in the context of society in a very complex way, so that they are neither reducible to each other nor parallel ‘structures’ (or ‘systems’ or whatever) which need just to be articulated (even if in a ‘dialectical’ manner). 3 Moreover, there are several inaccuracies, too—even of terminological nature, which is a little strange in a book so much concerned about terminology. Just one example: when he critically mentions ‘[...] what David Harvey (2000 Harvey, D. 2000. Spaces of Hope, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]) and others have called merely “militant localism”’ (p. 22), he apparently ignores that (1) as far as militant particularism is concerned, Harvey (1996 Harvey, D. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar], 2000 Harvey, D. 2000. Spaces of Hope, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]) was in fact engaged in a productive dialogue with Raymond Williams (who, by the way, coined the expression); and that (2) Williams’s ‘militant particularism’ does not have anything to do with ‘localism’ in the usual sense, since it precisely corresponds to the overcoming of parochialism by means of connecting particular (local) experiences with general (supralocal) claims in the framework of concrete struggles and in the course of consciousness raising and network building: ‘Of course almost all labour struggles begin as particularist. People recognize some condition and problem they have in common, and make the effort to work together to change or solve it. But then this is nothing special in the working class. You have only to look at the militancy of stockbrokers or of country landowners or of public‐school headmasters. The unique and extraordinary character of working‐class self‐organization has been that it has tried to connect particular struggles to a general struggle in one quite special way. It has set out, as a movement, to make real what is at first sight the extraordinary claim that the defense and advancement of certain particular interests, properly brought together, are in fact in the general interest’ (Williams, 1989 Williams, R. 1989. Resources of Hope. Culture, Democracy, Socialism, London and New York: Verso. [Google Scholar], p. 249). Or, as Harvey summarises: ‘Ideas forged out the affirmative experience of solidarities in one place get generalized and universalized as a working model of a new form of society that will benefit all of humanity’ (1996 Harvey, D. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar], p. 32)
Aesthetics · Autonomy · Criticism · Democracy · Epistemology · Government (linguistics · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Psychic · Reflexivity · Repetition (rhetorical device · Social science · Sociology · French Urban and Social Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |