Policy Futures in Education

Volume 7 Number 1 2000

www.wwwords.co.uk/PFIE

Space, Time, History:

the reassertion of space in social theory

MICHAEL A. PETERS
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
FABIAN KESSL
University Duisberg-Essen, Germany

ABSTRACT The reassertion of space is discussed as an analytical awareness of the past

obsession with temporal logics. Theorists now understand that social sciences discourses
were shaped by a preoccupation with the temporal scales and logics of development
considered as natural processes. The spatial turn in social theory is often seen to be a process
of de-naturalizing space. The article argues that not only space, but ‘spacetime’ has to be de-
naturalized. On that background the current debate between a humanist Marxism and
poststructuralism is discussed. To overcome the founding distinctions a number of scholars
are trying to model a relational idea of spacetime. With regard to David Harvey’s current
work and the work of the Swiss geographer Benno Werlen and the German sociologist
Martina Löw, the scope of such an approach in humanities is discussed.

Introduction: ‘space’ also has a history

Spatialization has almost become a synonym for globalization, except contemporary discussions
are more nuanced and alert to the ways in which different processes of spatialization overlap and
help define types of globalization. Contemporary analyses are more aware of the past obsession
with temporal logics from the invention of time pieces and regulation of daily life to the birth of the
novel and the aestheticization of time portrayed in the life history as the basis for a kind of
historical self-reflection. Theorists now also understand that social sciences discourses appearing in
the nineteenth century were shaped by a preoccupation with the temporal scales and logics of
development considered as natural processes, whether cosmological, geological, evolutionary, or
historical – as of civilizations, the nation state, individuals and, even, concepts.
The concept of time that grounded these common conceptions was largely a product of the
prevailing cultural outlook and technology or the instruments with which time became measured
with greater scientific precision. This ‘technology of time’ opened the way towards a naturalization
of time intervals – the minute, hour, day, year, and decade intervals, and later, that of the second
and nanosecond. To fully understand the current reassertion of space in social theory, to use
Edward Soja’s (1989) handy characterization, we need to know more precisely the governing
conceptions of time, both the logics and scales, the measurement systems and their applications
that developed during the course of the European Enlightenment and came to dominate German
historiography in the nineteenth century and political theory after Kant. These idealist conceptions
are still highly influential, designing as they do notions of both modernization and modernity, and,
indeed, together, the future of liberal culture and society.
The concept of time as the single notion of ‘spacetime’ only received its scientific statement in
mathematics and physics at the turn of the century with Albert Einstein. Up until then the

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Space, Time, History

dominant conceptions, especially as they informed philosophy, the humanities and the social
sciences, tended to regard time and space as separate and interdependent. In the ‘natural
philosophy’ of the times, from Descartes to Newton, time and space were posited as absolute
entities. With Einstein’s theories of relativity in 1905 and 1916 does the common perception based
on his work begin to understand that space and time are relative to the observer. Einstein can be
seen as the last theoretician in the long tradition of relative space concepts we can understand as
coming from Aristotle through to Leibniz. The latter argues that space and even time is something
purely relative; an order of existences in a neighborhood as the time is an order of each coming
after the other.
The German mathematician Hermann Minkowski posited a four-dimensional space in 1907,
with time as the fourth dimension, thus defining spacetime as a single independent phenomenon
and elegantly expressing the theory of special relativity worked out by Einstein and Lorentz.
Minkowski’s spacetime is the mathematical means by which Einstein’s theory of special relativity is
generally formulated. Formally speaking the structure of spacetime is expressed as a four-
dimensional real vector space (a set of four mutually orthogonal vectors) which describes physical
systems in terms of causal timelike or spacelike structures (see Nabor, 1997). Spacetimes are
environments in which physical events take place. Minkowski essentially formulates a conception
of space that went beyond the then ruling conception of Euclidean geometric space. Euclidean
geometry is based on a generalization of Euclid’s concept of distance and related concepts of length
and angle that coordinate a system in any dimension, enabling an investigation of its topological
qualities. Metric space in mathematics is understood as a set where distance is defined as a
relationship between elements. Indeed, one of the prime movers behind developments in concepts
of space in the social sciences are developments in mathematics at the turn of the century and, in
particular, the field known as topology, which studies properties of spaces such as connectedness,
convergence, compactness, and continuity.
The spatial turn in contemporary social theory has gone through a number of theoretical
manifestations largely emanating from the increasing mathematization, abstraction and
formalization of space and time in everyday life, due to the conception of spacetime and its filtered
cultural adoption and adaptation in aesthetics and the succession of avant-gardes, and in the
humanities, arts and social sciences. The relation between the science of linguistics and topology is
one of the driving logics for the development of structuralism as an aspect of European formalism
beginning in pre-revolutionary Russia (see Peters, 1996, ch. 1) and spreading across the disciplines
in physics, mathematics (especially, the Bourbaki group), biology, linguistics, poetics, art, cultural
theory and epistemology (see Piaget, 1972). Spatial turns can also be witnessed in phenomenology
with its focus on the body (e.g. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre; see Peters, 2004a,b), in the
geography-centered Annales school (Bloch, Febvre, Braudel), and in revitalized traditionally spatial
disciplines such as architecture, urban planning and geography (Lefèbvre, Harvey, Soja, Massey).
But what does it mean to consider a spatial turn? Geographers such as David Harvey (1990)
have been to the forefront, in particular, in examining and explaining time-space compression as
part of the postmodern condition. The change in the human experience of space and time is for
Harvey the most important cultural change in the transformation from Fordism to flexible
accumulation – and from modernity to postmodernity. His analysis of time-space compression is
linked to an analysis of the capitalist system and he argues that with the advent of the speed of
faster telecommunications the production of real commodities ceased to be essential to the system
and the financial system simultaneously became global at the same time as becoming de-linked to
the production of real commodities. The spatial turn therefore means a reassertion of space in a
new way – virtually, individualized, and well calculated. The model of the nation states as the
universal western model of political spaces, at least since the late eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries, is questioned fundamentally. Network-structures arising, immaterial work, knowledge
and information are defining the core of the advanced liberalism. In the view of Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri the new forms of capitalist production do not need territorial or physical centers any
more. Reassertion of space in that sense means a process of de-naturalizing space.
But to take the reshaping of the nation states primarily as a process of spatialization should not
ignore the fact that these take place against the background of a former spatialization process: the
emergence of nation states itself. Henri Lefèbvre, therefore, places spatialization beside two other

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Michael A. Peters & Fabian Kessl

dimensions (growth and urbanization) as already being part of the threefold process founding the
western nation state. Spatialization for Lefèbvre is in that sense crucial for the nation state.
Investigating spatialization at the beginning of the twenty-first century means in our perspective
focusing on a new form of spatialization: new spatial alignments of the relationships and sites of
governing, as John Clarke (2007, pp. 57f.) puts it:
The western nation state was also a welfare state, a space of normalizing individual life
conduct (Max Weber) to regulate everyday life in regard to specific temporal scales. To
accept that normalizing time-space promises even the working citizens and their families an
amount of aid in needed situations – even in very different amounts regarding to the
different welfare state models. That promise of an integrational nation-space is under siege
in the context of the emergence of the new spatial alignments. To substitute that missing
new spaces being in demand: the community-space is coming back in. Small inclusive spaces
(districts, neighborhoods, families) are called to substitute the former nation as a welfare
state-space. [emphasis in original]

Humanist Marxism and Poststructuralism in the New Geography

Spatial analysis as part of education policy is a pressing set of theoretical and empirical issues for
educational theory has been dominated by temporal logics and metaphors since its inception –
from the staged development of children’s cognition to the educational modernization of the
State.[1] Recently, work in educational policy has employed sophisticated theorizations of space to
understand the spatial politics of educational policy, emphasizing the importance of the local, place
and the significance of developments in specific sites (see for example Schutz, 1997; ‘Constructing
Knowledge Spaces’ at http://www.wun.ac.uk/cks/index.html). A recent American Educational
Research Association (AERA) symposium reflected both the influence of poststructuralism and the
‘new geography’ in its investigations of the dimensions of ‘neoliberal spatial technologies,
geographies of school exclusion, spatial readings of disability, and the spatial politics of educational
privatization in the form of the US home schooling movement’.[2] In the recent set of papers
presented at AERA there was, I commented, a latent tension between a humanist Marxism and
poststructuralism that it seems reflects a larger set of differences not only within geography but
social theory itself.
Deborah Dixon and John Paul Jones III (2005) in their introduction to ‘Derridean Geographies’
in a recent issue of Antipode (advertised as ‘A Radical Journal of Geography’ [3]) begin by noting:
the decidedly awkward introduction of Derridean thought to geography in the 1990s, when
work that labelled itself as ‘post-structuralist’ or ‘post-modern’, as well as a host of concepts
and methods under the heading of ‘social theory’ and ‘literary theory’, were increasingly
deployed as a means of critiquing the ontological presumptions and claims to scientific
rigour of what were then considered to be the dominant ‘paradigms’ within the discipline,
namely spatial science, critical realist/Marxist, and humanist geographies. (p. 242)
Clive Barnett in ‘Life after Derrida’ in the same issue argues:
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a persistent complaint about Derrida concerned the
absence in his work of any substantive engagement with Marx or Marxism. When he finally
relented in the 1990s, the puzzlement set off by Specters of Marx (a book all about ghosts),
only made it clear that the demand that Derrida ‘do’ Marx was never really an invitation to
engage, but always more of a demand to conform. (p. 239)
Harvey himself is part of the problem; even though he drew on Foucault and Certeau in his
wonderfully rich descriptions of the experience of space and time in his Condition of Postmodernity
(Harvey, 1990), he had really returned to Lefèbvre and Bourdieu to pit a humanist Marxist
conception against ‘postmodern’ accounts which, for him, were already defined as part of the
problem – postmodern reality as a kind of ‘disruptive spatiality’ that destroys the coherence of
perspective, the unity of daily life and fragments identity. There is no disputing the power of
Harvey’s analyses of the experience of space: the emphasis on space by modern aesthetic theory;
the relation between spatialization and representation; individual spaces and different spatial
approaches to our social existence; symbolic orderings of time and space; time and space as sources

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Space, Time, History

of social power; the time and space of the Enlightenment project; and time-space compression, the
rise of modernism as a cultural force, and the postmodern condition.
It is necessary to return to Henri Lefèbvre’s ([1974] 1991) The Production of Space to witness its
magnetic influence on a generation of architects, geographers and urban planners, including
Harvey,[4] and which developed a radical phenomenology of space within a humanist Marxist
framework that emphasized a critique of ‘spatial alienation’ (Guy Debord’s term) that comes about
as a result of the creation and administration of capitalist abstract space that imposed and
reinforced a social homogeneity. He begins his magnum opus with exactly this thought: ‘Not so
many years ago space had a strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an
empty space’. As he goes on to say, space became purely a mathematical concept and ‘to speak of
“social space” would, therefore, sound strange’ (p. 1). Lefèbvre discusses the philosophy of space in
the work of Descartes and Kant and the concept’s gradual emancipation from traditional
metaphysics (where it was regarded as absolute and one of the categories), to its modern
mathematical and scientific forms, and also its status as a ‘mental thing’ in contemporary
epistemology. He criticizes Foucault (Kristeva, Derrida and Barthes) for his concept of space that
never bridges the gap between the theoretical and the practical, the mental and the social, and the
space between philosophers and people. He complains that the idea of ‘man’ is conspicuous by its
absence and, by contrast, goes on to develop a concept of ‘lived space’ that must be reappropriated
and won back from capitalist control and domination.
It is helpful to locate Lefèbvre within the Situationist International and in terms of the triangle
of influence consisting of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche.[5] In an interview with Kristin Ross, Lefèbvre
(1997) explains that the Situationist (based on ‘situations’ like ‘moments’ in English) started with
COBRA, a Nordic group of architects, including Constant Nieuwenhuys and Asger Jorn, who
wanted to ‘renew the action of art of life’ through the production of utopian spaces. It was this
stimulus and the idea that architecture could transform daily life that led Lefèbvre to write Critique
of Everyday Life (2008) that develops a core Marxist humanism and critiques alienation and
celebrates spontaneity, play and self-expression inspired by readings of Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer.[6] This is the basis of Lefèbvre’s ‘rights to space’ and ‘rights to the city’ that have
inspired the UNESCO-led World Charter on the Right to the City, which ‘seeks to (1) promote
equal access to the potential benefits of the city for all urban dwellers, (2) encourage the democratic
participation of all urban dwellers in decision-making processes, notably on the municipal level, so
that (3) urban inhabitants may fully realize their fundamental rights and liberties’.[7] Rob Shields
(2002) explains:
the ‘perceived space’ (‘le perçu’) of everyday social life and commonsensical perception
blends popular action and outlook but is often ignored in the professional, and theoretical
‘conceived space’ (‘le conçu’) of cartographers, urban planners, or property speculators.
Nonetheless, the person who is fully human (l’homme totale) also dwells in a ‘lived space’
(‘le vécu’) of the imagination and Moments which has been kept alive and accessible by the
arts and literature. This ‘third’ space not only transcends but has the power to refigure the
balance of popular ‘perceived space’ and the ‘conceived space’ of arrogant professionals and
greedy capitalists.
As Shields also explains the true coordinates of Lefèbvre’s thought thus are the contemporary
avant-garde, not only Dada and Dadaism but also the Surrealists and particularly the work of René
Magritte, which Lefèbvre believed had the power to call forth new, creative and potentially
revolutionary spatializations. The problem was that Lefèbvre did not reconceptualize the body but
remained within an unreconstructed phenomenology of the body that did not take account of
either the poststructuralist critique of humanism (inspired by Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’)
or the gendered, cultural and socially situated spaces of bodies.[8]
Harvey, strongly influenced by Jameson’s Marxist account of postmodernism as the culture of
late capitalism, reads postmodernism back onto the latest round of time-space compression as the
condition for flexible accumulation. This very popular Marxist reading that refused to draw
distinctions between postmodernism and poststructuralism, or, in its crudest versions, did not
differentiate postmodernism in the arts from postmodernism in architecture or literature, tended to
tell a story that privileged Marxism as the superior master discourse especially in its spatial register
that provided an all-embracing analysis of everything, including the theorists labeled

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Michael A. Peters & Fabian Kessl

poststructuralist who were often lumped together and treated as postmodern ephemera. This
polarization had already taken place between Habermas and Lyotard, and Habermas and Foucault
and Derrida. It was a damaging debate for the humanities and social sciences that presented itself in
rhetorical terms and the force of which petered out as the 1980s and 1990s rolled by. Habermas,
who regarded modernity as an incomplete project and likened ‘poststructuralists’ to the young
conservatives of the Weimar Republic, considerably softened his position as time went by so much
so that he could concede in an obituary to Foucault (once critiqued as ‘presentistic, relativistic, and
cryptonormative’) that praised his genealogical thinking and a decade later contribute to a book
with Derrida (Philosophy in an Age of Terror: dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida,
Giovanni Borradori (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
While Harvey (1999) could write with irony of his own construction (reading) of Marx he,
nevertheless, in some ways misses the point regarding contemporary French theorists, focusing on
their ‘fashionability’ rather than on the potency of their ideas and, in particular, their distinctive
contribution to an analysis of the power relations constituting the production of social space:
Each generation cultivates its particular set of intellectual heroines and heroes. It would be
churlish of me to begrudge the younger generation their choice of such figures. Did I not
construct Marx in such a role? And while there is a certain lemming-like fashionability these
days in the rush to embrace the likes of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Butler,
Lacan et al., it would be equally churlish of me to suggest that there is nothing to be gained
from the study of such eminent thinkers.
This barely suppressed anti-poststructuralist attitude, which was more pronounced and even
institutionalized in the British than in the American academy during the 1970s and 1980s, and
stronger in some disciplines than others, has postponed the formal analysis at the expense of
rhetoric and denied the active engagement and dialogue between poststructuralism and radical
Marxist humanist geography on the question of space.[9] Any casual reading of French
structuralism would pick up the significance of the question of space which served to emphasize
the synchronic reading of structures even at the expense of the diachronic and later insisted on the
transformation of structures, their flexibility, mutability, and family resemblances.[10] What is
more, contemporaneously, French theory at once spatial and structuralist in epistemological terms
came to view cultural, social, national and political structures in relation to the self and the body,
providing a relational view that acted as a counterpoint to the phenomenology of Husserl and
Heidegger, and the existentialism of Sartre. Poststructuralism, as part of the development of
European formalism, displays certain affinities with structuralism in extending the critique of the
Cartesian-Kantian self, first critiquing ‘human nature’, denaturalizing its essence, temporalizing its
form, and, finally, spatializing the self by focusing on the embodied self (see Peters, 2005, 2006).
Relatively late in the development of body theory, writing in Society and Space, Felicity J. Callard
suggested that ‘Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. “The body”
is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to
base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations’ (p. 387). This issue also
contained David Harvey’s (1998) essay ‘The Body as an Accumulation Strategy’ which outlines a
Marxist theory of body formation under capitalism.

Absolute, Relative and Relational Space

Very recently David Harvey (2006) summarizes his own work in ‘Space as a Keyword’ in the
Critical Reader devoted to his work. His focus on the time-space connection is now an attempt to
integrate the three fundamental so-called spatio-temporal frames, which are epistemologically
primary: the absolute, the relative and the relational frame. All three have to be ‘kept in dialectical
tension’, as Harvey states (2006, p. 289).[11] Human action is always both spatial and temporal
action. Even if the idea of an absolute space was the dominant model for a long time, it was always
the case that different approaches to the question were made. In the ancient thinking besides the
Platonic model of space as a site of the human being, Aristotle asked for the limitation of human
bodies and Theophrast examined how the bodies are ordered and therefore what makes space as
such. Newton’s idea of the space as a fixed system of order, which is independent of bodies that are
integrated in that space, can be seen as the main source of the modern tradition of thinking about

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Space, Time, History

space as an absolute concept. Absolute space exists naturally without any connections to anything
else and therefore is always the same and static: simply a container. The physicist Carl Friedrich
von Weizsäcker provided a good metaphor for this absolute space model, when he described it as
tenements, where bodies move in. The building itself is existent before and opens up or closes the
space for them.
As mentioned before, Leibniz especially can be seen as probably the best known opponent to
Newton. Relative models of space, such as Leibniz’s, refer to the consideration that a space cannot
exist before the bodies which actually create the space. Space therefore cannot be seen as
independent from the bodies that constitute it. Leibniz in contrast to Newton sees space as an ideal
order, which is anchored in the creative-constructive force of human beings. The position of a body
depends on the relation to other bodies. Space can’t be defined in any general sense. Spatial
definition is always from the position of the observer. If you change your position or your
perspective, you will get a different spatial order. Such relativistic doubts on absolute models of
space can be seen as the engine of the spatial turn. Analyzing the increase in transnational
connections, digitalized communication or immaterial work challenges the dominant models of
absolute space. The new spatial arrangements can be seen as the material basis for the reassertion
of space in social theory, but there is also a conceptional dynamic to consider: that is, the model of
relative spaces, marginalized in the literature for a long time, has now come to the forefront again.
Benno Werlen (1992) presents the most elaborated spatial theory that develops the relative
model. The Swiss geographer proposes in a very strong Leibnizian manner the perspective to
understand space as always a result of human action. He argues for a move from a ‘geography of
objects’ to a ‘geography of subjects’: not space, but action shall be the cornerstone of human
geography. Harvey and others, like the German sociologist Martina Löw (2001), are now trying to
take the best out of both models and integrate them in a relational approach. Löw, who published
her Sociology on Space (2001), shows that we can only get an appropriate understanding of space
when we see the existence of space as the relation (Anordnung: system order) between things and
actors without ignoring the fact that these relations have to be re-built by actors (Spacing) all the
time (Löw, 2007, pp. 98f.). For Löw space is always an activity of spacing by human subjects. Even
Löw points out that the (neo)Marxist perspective is still in danger of reproducing an absolute space:
the ‘alienated capitalist time-space’. She can be seen as a critical follower and can be read parallel to
Harvey’s late considerations. Both develop a tripartite framework of an absolute, or better, a
materialistic space, a relative space and lastly attempt to integrate both notions in a relational
concept of time-space. (Löw uses the terms Anordnung and Spacing – in English – while Harvey uses
the phrases cramped physical structure of the exhibit and sequential motion of the visitor through the space).
This tripartite of the space is a main figure in the Marxist space theory. Henri Lefèbvre’s
distinction between a lived, a perceived and a conceived space can be seen as the starting point of such
thoughts. Following his ideas on everyday life as the space of ‘real life’ (true humanism) Lefèbvre
argues in his theoretical applications of space as a living space, a space of action, which in capitalist
societies is contrasted with a perceived space of alienation. The conceived space is ultimately a
symbolic space – for example a space of artists – which is able to overcome the alienated space and
show an image of the former real space. The triangle between an absolute, a relative and a
relational space (Harvey) mirrors that analytical triangle. And even Löw’s perspective, which
explicitly criticizes the Marxist model as an inadequate absolute-space approach and the action
theoretical as an inadequate relativistic approach, tries to integrate both in overcoming them and
developing a relational approach: ‘Therefore my starting point is a social space, which is
characterized through its material and symbolic components’ (Löw, 2001, p. 15, own translation).
Nevertheless, a relational model provides a much better analytical heuristic than either an
absolute or a relativistic approach since we can integrate more than actors and things in the
relational model: for instance, the relation to sites, scales, meanings. The distinction between a
relative and an absolute model of space can be heuristically helpful, but at the same time it has the
danger of (re)producing a dichotomous model, which overcomes the very diverse models of space
we can find, working on space and spatiality. A tripartite framework can open a new perspective, if
we take the figure of relational spaces as the cornerstone. Such wide concepts of relational
spatiality allow us to deal with the fact that we can’t separate space from time in the way that
western thinkers have done and still try to do. With an understanding of spatiality as a dynamic

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Michael A. Peters & Fabian Kessl

pattern of relational spatial pieces, we can’t conceptualize space anymore as ‘a static backdrop to
time’s activity’ (Thrift, 2006, p. 142). We have to be aware of its dynamism, its heterogeneity and of
course its invisible parts. Or, as Rob Shields (2006, p. 149) formulates it: ‘We need to know about
“spacing” and the spatializations that are accomplished through everyday activities, representations
and rituals’. That does not mean that we should not work on spatial frameworks to improve our
ability to speak of current developments. From an analytical view, on the current transformation of
the former welfare state arrangements, for example the reformation of the Social (Robert Castel),
we can see four aspects to be significant: globalization, spatial divisions, reinventing communities and
responsibilization (see Kessl & Reutlinger, 2007).

Reformulation of the Social

The space of nation states in the last decades of the twentieth century were more and more
reshaped as part of the process of globalization. Cash flows, financial transactions, and insurance
have become international whereas commodities and life styles are increasingly homogenized in a
global world. More than US$350 trillion are transferred every year on the world finance markets
and more than US$1500 billion every day. A huge part of that money is ‘fictive capital’ (after Marx).
Such money, which is no longer bound to specific production-processes or services, is growing out
of itself. The growth of capital therefore no longer means (real) economic growth. As George
Ritzer shows, another characteristic of the globalization process is social forms, which are almost
free of content. Ritzer (2004) speaks of a Globalization of Nothing. Fashion, furniture or fast food is
produced and consumed globally in the same way – relatively independently from the specific
local, regional or national culture. The technical possibilities and the broad invention of global
transport and communication-structures are fundamental for this kind of globalization. New media
gives access to bridge great geographical distances almost without losing time. Optimized social
and spatial mobilities and the option to base human relations virtually or maintain them change the
social structures above and below the local and national scale.
Secondly, the spatial divisions – horizontal and vertical – are increased in the nation states and
even between them. In the last third of the twentieth century a spatial manifestation of social
division can be noticed. Specific cities and regions as well as single neighborhoods and districts
embrace a much higher number of poor, jobless or precarious working inhabitants. The format of
spatial manifestation of social divisions is internationally very distinctive: while we can observe real
hyperghettos (Loic Wacquant) in the USA and banlieues in France, we find only weakly excluded
areas in Germany or Italy. However, it has to be recognized that even if we talk about spatial
manifestation of social divisions we see the majority of the societal members in poverty still living
in some other parts of the cities and not in the so-called hot spots.
Interestingly, political strategies connect the diagnosis of a spatial division with a new call for
community building: The place of disintegration shall be the place of social healing at the same
time. Therefore, we can identify, as mentioned before, a growing number of political programs in
the last 20 years looking for a spatial alternative to the nation state’s integration space. Focusing on
the local communities, the social unities of the family, the neighborhood or a voluntary association
shall open new spaces of inclusion. That new inclusive scale is therefore prioritized on the political
agenda; not only in regard to marginalized or poor neighborhoods, but also as strategies of
neighborhood support or neighborhood-watch.
So, lastly, the new inclusive spaces shall offer not only social networks, but safety for the
inhabitants, too. If the nation state – as a strong or a weak welfare state – will no longer work for
integration reasons, new security spaces also have to be built. These new social safety communities
might be run by the families and neighborhoods and developed as fast as possible. Besides such
community safety strategies we can also see the rise of a number of punitive strategies to ‘save’
neighborhoods – especially those of wealthy people, with more police patrols, gated communities,
new alarm systems and the growth of private security services. Others not belonging to the
community will be controlled or even blocked before they can move in. In the case of poor
neighborhoods, which are claimed not to be able to secure themselves, new criminal prevention or
even policing strategies are implemented. The strategies of community policing are now
legitimized as being the only way to substitute and re-build the missing responsibility of the

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Space, Time, History

inhabitants – and therefore build again safety in everyday life. In the long run they can lead to new
‘responsible’ communities.

Conclusion
Space has a history and the spatial turn has undergone a series of formulations and reformulations.
The new geography is the discipline which has tried to grapple with these different theorizations
and has to date provided the most comprehensive models or approach for understanding social
space. Yet even so some of these approaches as we have argued tend to reflect the ideological
nature of theoretical discussion that took place some time ago and the statement of positions has
postponed useful and honest confrontations between, say, Foucault and Lefèbvre. Now we need to
reframe notions of absolute, relative and relational accounts of space to emphasize the complexity
of social space and the active construction of space and time (Spacing) as aspects of human beings
living in the world. Speaking elsewise: an appropriate analytical approach has to start at the point of
a constitutive, but ambivalent sameness of the efficacy of the dominant orders of space (‘state-
space’, ‘gender-space’, ‘race-space’, ‘class-space’, ‘cultural-space’ and so on) and the fact of their
social construction (see Kessl & Reutlinger, 2007).
The four dimensions, we mentioned, can be very helpful to get a picture of current
spatialization processes: globalization, spatial divisions, reinventing communities and responsibilization.
What they can show is that the current reassertion of space is politically part of a broader political
strategy to recover a new certainty, how to act in a contingent world: identifying the ‘problematic’
and the ‘unproblematic’ spaces, calling for a new social basis and securing areas in a globally – but
also nationally and regionally – diverse space. Even the call for realizing the diversity – not least on
the background of an idealistic everyday life approach – is at least often the hope for finding in the
ordering patterns in the different milieu Black communities, Gay communities, Religious
communities, but what about the political community?
While the ‘modern subjects’ were called to write their space and time tracts in or even against
the given ways – Michel de Certeau (1984, p. 93), besides Lefèbvre the most influential source of
the everyday life approach in the French tradition (le quotidien), speaks about the ‘ordinary
practitioners as walkers ... whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of urban texts’ – the
postmodern ‘subject’ is now called to calculate independently his or her space- and time-writing.
The ‘consumer-subject’ seems to be free to choose whatever it wants or even can want. The
trouble is that access is only a myth, but the basis of the power of consumption is desire. But to
deal with this problem of access or non-access to spaces is very difficult, especially when the
majority of spaces are privatized spaces and primarily spaces for consumers (e.g. cultural activities
or activities in leisure times).
And at the same time an ongoing process of political struggles for new regulation strategies is
on the agenda, even if that means new spaces are constructed and reconstructed on ‘various
geographical scales and territorial sites’ (Brenner et al, 2003, p. 11; see Kessl & Otto, 2007).
Like the sameness of de-territorialization and reterritorialization we can currently consider two
dimensions of spatialization, which are mostly seen as being in a contrast: the search for
(re)orientation (where can we anchor the space in our actions – politically, culturally, socially?) and
the call for realizing diversity (don’t ignore the multiplicity, heterogeneity and diversity of spaces).
But both are often part of a search for certainty in an uncertain world.

Notes
[1] Peters first commented on these matters in a chapter entitled ‘Architecture of Resistance: education
and the “politics of space”’, written over 10 years ago for a book entitled Poststructuralism, Politics and
Education (Peters, 1996) where he investigated the poststructuralist critique of subject-centered
reason, both historically and theoretically, against the background of the modernity/postmodernity
and ‘information society’ debates and the rise of neoliberalism. Then, strongly influenced by
Foucault’s essays on space, I was concerned to look at both architecture and geography as providing
two disciplinary models for examining the ‘politics of space’.

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Michael A. Peters & Fabian Kessl

[2] ‘The Assertion of Space in Educational Theory and Policy’, AERA 2006: ‘Education, Policy, and
Governance: the spacing and placing of difference’, Felicity Armstrong (Institute of Education,
London). ‘Neoliberal Spatial Technologies in the Inner City: absent middle classes, education
markets, and urban renewal’, Kalervo N. Gulson (Charles Sturt University); ‘The Spatial Politics of
Educational Privatization: constructing the US homeschooling movement’, Claudia Hanson Thiem
(University of Wisconsin-Madison); ‘The Power-Geometries of the Modern English School’, Pat
Lorna Thomson (The University of Nottingham); ‘“Space” Also Has a History: spatial turns in
contemporary social theory’, Michael Peters (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
[3] Antipode has consistently introduced and themes of the ‘new cultural geography’, foregrounding
issues in geographies of exclusions, gender, and race based around poststructuralism, postmodernism
and postcolonialism. See http://www.envplan.com/epd/epd_current.html
[4] Harvey writes the ‘Afterword’ for the English translation by the one-time Situationist Donald
Nicholson-Smith, who also translated Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Anselm Jappe’s
Guy Debord.
[5] See Eldon (2001, 2004).
[6] Lefèbvre publishes an anti-fascist reading of Nietzsche in 1939 and later emphasizes the revolutionary
potential of play that parallels both Lyotard’s ‘libidinal economy’, and Deleuze and Guattari’s
account of ‘desiring machines’. Lefèbvre ([1974] 1991) writes ‘only Nietzsche, since Hegel, has
maintained the primordiality of space and concerned himself with the spatial problematic’ and
‘Nietzschean space preserves not a single feature of the Hegelian view of space as product and
residue of historical time’ (p. 22).
[7] See the UNESCO discussion paper ‘Urban Policies and the Right to the City’ at
http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/ev.php-
URL_ID=8198&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
[8] Edward Soja’s ‘Thirdspace’ is a conception borrowed from Lefèbvre which consists in projects that
combine the material, sociological or ethnographic analysis of actual lived spaces and built
environments with textual analyses of imagined or figurative spaces. In this light and with similar
motivations I suggest ‘edutopologies/edutopographies’ as the disciplinary matrix that provides some
lines for radical interdisciplinarity that characterizes the papers in this symposium: 1. Textual
spaces/spaces of representation (Literary Studies); 2. Embodied and gendered spaces – spaces of
identity (Philosophy; Feminism; Anthropology); 3. Institutional and dwelling spaces (Architecture); 4.
The city, the region, the country (Geography; Urban Planning); 5. Globalization and transnational
spaces (Economics; Cultural Studies); 6. Spaces of history – colonial spaces (History); 7. Imaginary
spaces (Utopian Studies); 8. Topological spaces (Discrete Mathematics); 9. The space of migrations,
diasporas, flows (Migration Studies); 10. The technologies of networked spaces (Information Studies).
[9] In Poststructuralism, Marxism and Neoliberalism (Peters, 2001) Peters argues that poststructuralism is
neither anti-structuralist nor anti-Marxist and demonstrated this through an engagement with specific
texts to illustrate the relation of Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida and Deleuze to Marxism.
[10] One only has to read the French epistemologists Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem who
theorized ‘the spatialization of knowledge’ long before Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions and strongly influenced Foucault. A number of works are canonical texts on space in the
poststructuralist tradition, including: Bachelard’s Poetics of Space which was first published in 1957
(translated in 1964) and was specifically concerned with understanding the psychodynamics of
existential space; Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception (original French, 1945);
and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (German, 1927) and his essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’
(German, 1954).
[11] Harvey sees this tripartite framework as a exact parallel to the Marxian tripartite model of use-value,
exchange-value and value.

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MICHAEL A. PETERS is Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-

Champaign, USA, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Art at Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology (RMIT), Australia. He previously held a personal chair at Auckland University and
position as research professor at the University of Glasgow. He has held positions as visiting
professor in over twenty universities around the world. He is the Executive Editor of Educational
Philosophy and Theory (Wiley-Blackwell) and Editor of two international ejournals, Policy Futures in
Education and E-Learning (Symposium). His interests are in education, philosophy and science. His
most recent books include: Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (with P. Murphy & S.
Marginson) (Peter Lang); Global Knowledge Cultures (Sense, 2008) (with C. Kapitzke); Building
Knowledge Cultures: educational and development in the age of knowledge capitalism (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2006), (with T. Besley); and Knowledge Economy, Development and the Future of the
University (Sense, 2007). He was elected a lifelong fellow by the New Zealand Academy of
Humanities in 2008.Correspondence: Professor Michael A. Peters, Educational Policy Studies,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 360 Education Building, 1310 South 6th Street,
Champaign, IL 61820, USA (mpet001@illinois.edu).

FABIAN KESSL is Professor for Theory and Practice of Social Work at at the Faculty for
Educational Science, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He is member of the Editorial Board of
two leading German Journals in Social Work and Social Policy (Neue Praxis and Widersprüche) and
Managing Director of ‘Social Work & Society – Online-Journal for Social Work and Social Policy’
(http://www.socwork.net). His basic interest is in the current transformation of welfare and quasi-
welfare arrangements since the 1970s. In particular Fabian Kessl is interested in the
governmentality of social services and social policy and the spatial formation-shifts of social policy.
This work has been developed through a number of German books and international edited
volumes. Recent publications in the area of interest: De- and Reterritorialization of the Social-Special
Issue for Social Work & Society (edited with John Clarke, 2008); Territorialisierung des Sozialen: Zur
Regierung sozialer Nahräume (Barbara Budrich, 2007; edited with Hans-Uwe Otto); Schlüsselwerke der
Sozialraumforschung (VS, 2008; edited with Christian Reutlinger).

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