Practice, Communication and Space: a Reflection on the Materiality Of

Space and the Communicative Constitution of Social Practice 1 Practice, Communication and Space A reflection on the materiality of social structures A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Vinicius de Moraes Netto The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies University College London University of London Space and the Communicative Constitution of Social Practice 2 …symbols are required to make traces of what is not given apparent in what is given. Jürgen Habermas [on Cassirer], On the Logic of the Social Sciences, 1988 The imageries of space are the dream of society. Wherever the hieroglyph of space lies deciphered, there is offered the grounds of social reality.1 Siegfried Kracauer, Über Arbeitsnachweise, 1929 1 “Die Raumbilder sind die Träume der Gesellschaft. Wo immer die Hieroglyphe irgendeines Raumbildes entziffert ist, dort bietet sich der Grund der sozialen Wirklichtkeit dar” – personal translation. I would like to thank Marion Röhrig. Space and the Communicative Constitution of Social Practice 3 Abstract The general issue of relations between sociality and spatiality, until recently profoundly ignored outside spatial studies, has become a focus of great theoretical attention in a number of disciplines – what has been called, remarkably, the “spatial turn” in social and cultural theory. The thesis wishes to address a central problem in that debate: the connection of practice and space. It does so emphasising a dimension that has not been previously explored to a significant degree: the conditions of sociation of practice, or a material account of how action becomes social action and practice social practice. In other words, it investigates the place of space in semantically mediated interactions that constitute the knots in (spatialised) networks of sociation – or communication. The thesis explores the spatiality of practice and communication as a problem worth of theoretical attention, suggesting that precisely the absence of this dimension has led theory to fail to spot the spatial traces of relations between our daily acts – traces active in the very moment of sociation of practice, indeed constitutive of the very possibility of any sociation; traces produced and performed through the interpenetration of communication and space. The question the thesis addresses is the possibility of space not just as contingent location but also in itself encapsulating an essential constituent of the communicative condition of the social. The aim of this thesis is to focus on this theoretical deficit in a number of ways. First, existing theories of society and space relations as found in social theory, architecture and human geography are reviewed in order to assess how far they provide compelling answers to the problem of the communicative constitution of practice, and from this analysis, to set areas where further progress is needed. Second, an attempt is made to build an alternative frame to the sociality-spatiality relation as a relation between practice, communication and space, drawing on a number of diverse sources, mainly the theory of self-referentiality of Niklas Luhmann, the theory of communicative action of Jürgen Habermas, the post-modern questioning of notions like “meaning” and “structure,” and new approaches in human geography and architecture. Thirdly, the implications of this unconventional approach to the spatiality of the social world are discussed, and a concept, the duality of meaning is proposed as a means to address the multiple relations between space and social practice. Fourth, the thesis suggests the possibility that the spatial emergence of practice as a communicative process requires, in order to come into being, some structuring of the space in which it occurs – a mutual, referential structuration beyond the contingency of practice and space. Developing the idea of space as referential to communication, the thesis shows how space becomes the unconscious but referential substrate which provides a certain form of available organisation to the semantic field where communication networks are performed, and social structures constantly emerge and fade away in connections of linguistic acts and spaces. It suggests that a new and active role for space may be identified in the sociality-spatiality relation: a “semanticised space” as a key dimension of (1) the “communicability of practice,” i.e. the informational connections that mediate the passage from the individual act into the socialised act that takes part in unfolding social events; and (2) the very possibility of ontological relatedness, Space and the Communicative Constitution of Social Practice 4 seeing space as a dimension of the “strings of reference” that produce the sense of “world-relationality” or structure, inform socialities of possibilities of acts, and constitute the very possibility of actualisation of acts through the referentiality of practice, communication and space. Disclosing a “material referentiality” at the heart of practice, as the crisscrossing of communication, language, and space, it finally suggests the possibility of space as a counterpart to the elusiveness of forms of communication and relationality in the social world, such as those semiotic fluxes based on spoken and written language, and electronic and visual media. In building such a conceptual scheme, the thesis lays down the aims of a “referential approach” to the materiality of the social world: clarifying space itself in the communicability of practice; clarifying its role for socialities by showing a referential space as a means to the sociation of acts; and clarifying socialities themselves by showing how profoundly and pervasively they rely on the referentiality of space. Word count: 98,877 including footnotes, and excluding Abstract, Table of Contents, List of Illustrations, Acknowledgements, and References. Space and the Communicative Constitution of Social Practice 5 Table of contents Abstract 3 List of illustrations 8 Acknowledgements 9 Introduction: Space and the communicative constitution of social practice 11 1 Relations of the Social and the Material 31 Marxist theories 32 Edward Soja and the socio-spatial dialectic 33 David Harvey and the spaces of capital 36 The multiple spaces of Henri Lefebvre 40 A Durkheimian approach: Hillier and Hanson 47 Anthony Giddens: stretching social systems in space-time 51 The need for new material theories of the social? 55 2 Meaningfully-mediated Reproductions of the Social 58 Max Weber and the theory of social action 59 The interpretive methodology: Verstehen Soziologie 60 Habermas’ theory of communicative action 63 The communicative coordination of action 66 Space and (a paradigm of) communication? 70 3 “The Grounds of Social Reality” 73 The access to space as constitutive to action 77 Syntactic space 80 Space and the Communicative Constitution of Social Practice 6 Beyond syntax: The limits to physical space as social information 85 Semiotic space 93 Semantic space and the grounds of social practice 94 The hermeneutic actor-space relation 97 The spatiality of context 101 Space as interpretive resource 103 Space in the production of communication 106 Mutual understanding and the fluidity of interaction 107 4 The Duality of Meaning 111 Performative theories in a “world on the move” 113 Other relationalities: Luhmann’s self-referentiality 116 Meaning and ontological relationality 121 Luhmann and Deleuze on the actualisation of the act 124 Referential meaning and the human subject 127 Event in experience and the experience of reference: The “duality of meaning” 133 5 “Desperately Seeking Structure” 138 “Desperately seeking structure” 141 Derrida and the metaphysics of structure 141 Bauman and the compulsion to structure 144 Luhmann’s Strukturifizierung 147 Practice as networks of communication 148 Social practice as “communication” 149 “Structure” as a communicative accomplishment 151 The referentiality of practice and space 156 The ambiguity of space as “environment” and “communication” 156 Space in the connectivity of practice 158 The spatial emergence of communication 166 Performing through referential space 168 Space and the Communicative Constitution of Social Practice 7 6 Space and the (Improbability of) Social Reproduction 171 Space and the articulation of action 173 “Synekism:” The stimulus to practice? 175 A critique of physical approaches to urban structuration 180 Spatial cores, or axial formations within cities 181 The improbable relation of materiality to immateriality 186 Time and change in different material realms 188 Space as obstacle to social change 191 The mutual structuration of communicative practice and space 192 Reinterpretations of the city: the “Referential City” 197 7 The Referential Approach to Society and Space 202 An alternative framing of the society-space relation 203 The limits to physical space as social information 205 Space and bodily-mediated communication 209 A return to “meaning” 212 Action as spatial networks of communication 217 Social production: connecting materiality and immateriality 222 Reflections on a referential approach 229 The “unstructured” 233 Future development of the framework 235 References 241 Space and the Communicative Constitution of Social Practice 8 List of illustrations Cover: Anselm Kiefer, “Lilith” 1987 (Tate Modern, London). 1 Figure 1: Spatial analysis of Tate Gallery, London (Space Syntax Lab) 83 Figure 2: Louis Kahn’s design for the Richards Lab (University of Pennsylvania). 88 Figure 3: Plan for a hospital in Brazil. 88 Figure 4: City

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