Theorizing Practice, Visualizing Theory, and Playing by the Rules

Sally Gomaa

continued . . .

A Definition of Space

Marxism is an interdisciplinary account of power relations because (1) it approaches all entities as "overdetermined," (i.e., none is independent and the production of each is contingent upon others) (Resnick and Wolff, 1987), because (2) it replaces the idealist subject-predication (consciousness) with a materialist subject-predication (labor-power) (Spivak, 1985), and because (3) for Marx the "primary ontological level of the constitution of the real" (using Laclau's terms) is the social.

In "From Human Being to Commodity," Marx defines "real nothingness" as "social nothingness" which is the condition of being for human consciousness reduced to its labor value. He uses "social" and "real" synonymically: "the abstract existence of man as a mere working man who therefore plunges everyday from his fulfilled nothingness into absolute nothingness, into social, and thus real, nothingness" (83). This social nothingness is the dominant discourse which allows "the same capital" to remain "the same in the most varied natural and social conditions, which have no relevance to its real content" (83). If real here is again social, then Marx views "natural conditions" as directly influencing and directly influenced by the interaction between capital and labor.

In "Wage labor and Capital," he articulates the same combination of energy, space, and time as pre-requisite for production:

In production, men not only act on nature but also on one another. They produce only by cooperating in a certain way and naturally exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another and only within these social connections and relations does their action on nature, does production, take place. (81)

The concept of "nature" Marx deploys here is not that of a static entity or a fixed enclosure; nature here is a site of contestation. Production is the sum of the interaction between humans and nature.

This Marxian view of nature informs Henri Lefebvre's definition of space as the "process" by which a society produces or generates "an appropriated social space in which it can achieve a form by means of self presentation and self-representation-a social space to which that society is not identical, and which indeed is its tomb as well as its cradle" (34), echoing Marx's words that people "not only act on nature but also on one another." Operating within a super-structure/infra-structure economy, Lefebvre explains the production of a "mental space" by a "theoretical practice" which appears to be "extra-ideological" because once produced, it starts assuming a neutral form. This mental space "then becomes the locus of a 'theoretical practice' which is separated from social practice and which sets itself up as the axis, pivot or central reference point of Knowledge." This new super-structure expresses the "dominant" ideas "which are perforce the ideas of the dominant class" (6). By the manipulation of an underlying logic and the employment of a technical expertise, this class seeks to establish a "system" (11).

Marx's emphasis on "the social" is developed by Lefebvre's questioning of the role played by language in the production of social space: "does language-logically, epistemologically or genetically speaking-precede, accompany or follow social space? Is it a precondition of social space or merely a formulation of it?" (16). This leads to another major question: "To what extent may a space be read or decoded?" (17). To Lefebvre, space can be read via a theory which acts as a "super-code": "If indeed spatial codes have existed, each characterizing a particular spatial/social practice, and if these codifications have been produced along with the space corresponding to them, then the job of theory is to elucidate their rise, their role, and their demise" (17). To theorize space in this sense is to read space, (i.e., to trace in space a set of coded relationships which can be decoded via language). Since reading involves an active text (i.e., a text which is over-determined by its effectivity at a particular moment in a particular place) and an active subject (one can read and write), then this view of space reinserts agency in the capitalist narrative.

In the (social) space between the economic infra-structure and the legal/cultural/ ideological super-structure a whole trajectory of the interaction between the individual and the State lies unexplored. To make it visible is to turn the State apparatus inside out: to reveal the internal cavities where many individuals have learned to "make do." In The Practice of Everyday Life de Certeau distinguishes between an official narrative occupying a "proper" and an "everyday life," which enunciates this narrative and manipulates its proper by "making do," (i.e., by devising a set of strategies to disguise one's subversion of the rules). The proper is "a triumph of place over time," "a panoptic practice," and a "precondition" for the production of disciplines (like the military or the legal system) which institutionalize certain types of knowledge (36).

De Certeau's theory deploys the concept of the "proper" to distinguish the strategies implemented by the State from the myriad "unnamable" and "invisible" tactics of "popular culture." These tactics are "the art of the weak," a maneuver which allows "the return of the ethical, of pleasure and of invention within the scientific institution" (28). This "return" implies an absence de Certeau never discusses, and it also turns "the scientific institution" into a monolithic enemy impersonal and, thus, implacable. To name these tactics, to make visible their operation within the panoptic structure of the dominant power is to exercise agency "within the enemy's field of vision" (37).

While de Certeau's discussion of "making do" does acknowledge the potential power of the individual who plays by the rules, he paradoxically insists on "invisibility" as a condition for the success of the tactic, which confines the scope of his discourse to abstraction. He asks: "Of all the things everyone does, how much gets written down?" (42). Contrary to what he seems to think, many. The purpose of reading space, the super-theory which decodes spatial significations and maps silences, is precisely to provide a methodology for articulating the relations which have always been written down: in the layout of a college campus, in the assignment of office space, in the placement of a TV set in a house, or in the display of commodities in a grocery store.

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