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Anthony Vidler
Assemblage, No. 20, Violence, Space. (Apr., 1993), pp. 84-85.
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Sun Feb 3 19:12:41 2008
Spatial Violence
The political force of such spatial paradigms cannot be denied. Certainly they
have acted to resist the insistent temporality of modernist historicism, the
implacable subsuming of the spatial in
the temporal, which, from Marx
through Bergson in philosophy, and
from Hegel through Sigfried Giedion in
aesthetics, construed architecture and
urbanism as the products and instruments of history. What the urban
geographer Edward Soja has termed
"the reassertion of space in critical
social theoryn-to use the sub-title of
his recent book Postmodern Geographies-takes on, in this context, a
necessarily oppositional character.
But a theon, of space, uncorrected by
any dialectical relationship with history, has often hovered dangerously
close to a metaphysics of place. In the
hands of Heidegger and his less sophisticated readers, such a metaphysics has
turned inevitably nostalgic and conservative in tenor. The social implications of spatial theon, are equally
prone to blindness-notably, as
Rosalyn Deutsche recently pointed out
in her article "Men in Space" (Art
Forum, February 1990), in the area of
gender distinctions, but also, equally,
in the context of debates over urban
planning, social welfare and the politics of homelessness.
Perhaps the paradigm holds as much
hope for discourse analysis as for the
Vidler