The Spatiality Life: Towards A Transformative Retheorisation

6
The Spatiality of Social Life: Towards

a Transformative Retheorisation .
EDWARD W. SOJA
Tenacious layers of mystification have recently begun to be peeled

away from our understanding of the spatiality of social life, from the
ways in which we account for and act upon the socially-produced
geographical configurations and spatial relations which give material
form and expression to society. This process of critical reinterpreta-
tion is revealing what has been obscured in both social and spatial
theory and in day-to-day practice: that spatiality situates social life in
an active arena where purposeful human agency jostles
problematically with tendential social determinations to shape
everyday activity, particularise social change, and etch into place the
course of time and the making of history.
To be alive is to participate in the social production of space, to
shape and be shaped by a constantly evolving spat iality which con-
stitutes and concretises social action and relationship. This has
always been true, but has remained largely outside our conscious
awareness, relatively untheorised and buried under multiple illusions
which have constrained the development of an appropriately
materialist interpretation of spatiality and spatial praxis. Now more
than ever before, however, the essential and encompassing spatiality
of social life is being progressively revealed and provocatively re-
positioned at the very heart of social theory and political conscious-
ness.
Expressions of this transformative materialist interpretation of
spatiality punctuate the recent theoretical literature more densely
than at any other time. Moreover, there has been a significant expan-
sion in the scale and scope of interpretation beyond the long-establi-
shed boundaries that have trad itionally confined and limited the
debate on the theorisation of space to particular disciplinary or
D. Gregory et al. (eds.), Social Relations and Spatial Structures

© Macmillan Publishers Limited 1985
Edward Uf. Soja 91
philosophical approaches. The contemporary reinterpretation of

spatiality engages and extends deeply into much broader realms of
social theory, philosophical argument, and practical application -
into areas of inquiry, discourse and social practice where it has in the
past received only perfunctory and peripheral attention.
Although broader in its origins and impact, this new theorisation
of spatiality has been most systematically asserted and explored
within the framework of a rejuvenated critical social theory which
draws heavily, either directly or through a vigorous reconstructive
critique, upon a Marxist tradition and adaptations of historical
materialist analysis. This is not surprising, for in so many ways the
materialist interpretation of spatiality, in its demystification and
politicisation of the production of space, is integrally linked with an
historical materialism broadly aimed at demystifying and politicising
the making of history. In the reinterpretation of space and time,
spatiality and history, that is so prominent a feature of contemporary
critical social theory, there is the basis for a distinctly historical and
geographical materialism, a more complete and balanced formula-
tion of the materialist dialectic to encompass both human history and
human geography as social products, sources of political conscious-
ness and arenas of situated social struggle.
There is more, however, to the emerging materialist interpretation
of spatiality than a confonnative and facile addition to conventional
Marxism. The balanced conjuncture of spatiality and history in the
constitution of material social life, and the formation of an accord-
ingly historico-geographical materialism , exposes contumaceous
realms of theoretical and political discourse which resist easy incor-
poration into established paradigmatic traditions. Demanded instead
is an extensive and flexible rethinking of both theory and practice, a
reconstruction which will continue to draw upon the achievements of
Marx but which must also be more directly attuned to the specificity
of contemporary capitalist (and socialist) spatiality and temporality.
Framing these observations is a belief that a momentous change is
occurring in the formulation of social theory that compares with the
transfonnative developments of the latter half of the nineteenth
century, the period in which both Marxism and the classical social
sciencestook distinct shape. The last three decades of the past century
were marked by decelerated economic growth, deepening crisis, and
far-reaching attempts to restructure social, economic, and political
conditions to recapture the expansive boom that followed the
European revolutions of 1848. As social life changed, so too did its

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6

The Spatiality of Social Life: Towards

Tenacious layers of mystification have recently begun to be peeled

D. Gregory et al. (eds.), Social Relations and Spatial Structures

philosophical approaches. The contemporary reinterpretation of

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