In this essay, Sally R. Munt proposes a theory of the self, which combines postmodernist visions of subjectivity as constellations of effects in space with modernist concerns regarding time. The result is an attempt to reconcile subjects and selves by arranging the singularities of spatial effects with continuities of chronology –- Munt proposes a notion of "self"that takes into account the eclectic nature of postmodern life with a recognition that this eclecticism is experienced by consciousness that experiences as a passage through time.

Framing Intelligibility, Identity, and Selfhood: A Reconsideration of Spatio-Temporal Models [printable version]

Sally R. Munt

<1> The relationship between intelligibility and identity over the past thirty years has largely been approached through the linguistic construct of the subject. Proposing that our subjectivities be theoretically comprehended (made intelligible) as discursive effects is now common sense. Poststructuralism, following particularly Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, has ensured that "the subject" is a cardinal category of contemporary thought; in any number of disciplines, it is one of the first concepts we teach to our undergraduates. But are we best served by continuing to insist on the intellectual primacy of the "subject," formulated as it has been within the negative paradigm of subjectivity as subjection? Not only do we need to readdress the question of agency, a persistently vexed issue for many major postmodern theorists, we also need to strategically offer more positive models for making sense of ourselves in the world -- if you like -- for making identity intelligible.

<2> In this paper I explore how a primarily spatial structure of subjectivity has reinforced the splitting off of the strange, excluded, and abjected other, into a perpetual, attenuated present. I discuss how this spatialised subjectivity has been understood as a mechanism of representation, and how in making us real, or making ourselves to mean, it has been bound up with marking identities as visible, thus intelligible. I explore whether, instead of pursuing the idea of the subject, we might instead lean toward a concept of the self, which, although undoubtedly is still somewhat dependent on spatial metaphor, can include a stronger emphasis on temporality, on narrative, and on agency. The idea of a self has been widely dismissed as a modern, and consequently obsolete concept; I would like to perform a critical return to it in the light of more recent theories.

<3> Human knowledge passes through two forms of cognition before it can be conceived: space and time. These two forms can be described as intuitive, in the sense that they precede conscious awareness -- in other words, we know before we experience things that we will perceive them as phenomena in space and time, they are the first filters of knowledge. Eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant made an important distinction between "the thing in itself" and "the thing for me": of the former, we cannot obtain prior and certain knowledge; of the latter, we accept that any knowledge we have is dependent upon knowledge-formations, and knowledge-structures, which are fundamentally organised by space and time. To put it another way, humans cannot conceive of their existence outside of space and time, therefore, to continue with Kant, space is a practical postulate -- something that has to be assumed for the sake of "praxis," or practice. To illustrate, astronomers argue that the universe is infinite and endless, an idea that is inconceivable, something we cannot imagine, and hence, cannot know. In deploying space and time in human knowledge we use notions of relativity i.e. objects are here or there, moments are now or then, these practices are referential in the sense that we know that something is, because of the thing that it is not.

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<4> In the last decade there has been a convergence across many academic disciplines -- that is to say in the intellectual formations of knowledge -- a concentrated effort, to comprehend spatial paradigms. Most of this work has been concerned with understanding how space organises human perception, and the practices that emerge from this cognitive framing. This endeavour has included spatial practices from the macro- to the micro-level, it has studied global configurations, national and geographic structures, societal classifications, art and architectural forms, urban and rural communities, the human body, and the internal psychic mapping of subjectivity (even the opposition of external/internal is a spatial assumption). The contemporary concern with space coincides with the emergence and critical predominance of postmodernism in Western intellectual culture. Postmodernism has refocused the analytical gaze in a sort of horizontal trajectory, to look around at the present, in tandem with a re-evaluation and dissatisfaction with linear models of time and progression. The emphasis has shifted from predominantly historical formulations to theorising the present, and space has become central to theorising about identity and culture. Within critical theory as a whole, space has been "mapped," "explored," "contested," and "colonised," as a metaphorical way of understanding the varied and multiple material effects of oppression and domination. Emerging from these critical and cultural studies is the embodiment of Foucault's project:

A whole history remains to be written of spaces -- which would at the same time be the history of powers (both terms in the plural) -- from the greatest strategies of geophysics to the little tactics of the habitat. [1]

Space is historically associated with Being, implying a kind of fixity and stasis, as opposed to time which is conceived of as becoming, of active progress. Traditionally the former is gendered as feminine and hierarchically subsumed under the masculine march of history. Space/Time is aligned with a series of antithetical binary opposites such as passive/active, feminine/masculine. As Elizabeth Grosz has illustrated that this binary is to be deconstructed: Space is not passive, fixed, or absolute -- it is a relational concept which depends on the position of objects contained within it: "Space makes possible different kinds of relations but in turn is transformed according to the subject's affective and instrumental relations with it" [2]. There is a certain, contingent coherence afforded by the subject's temporal movement through space, which becomes constituent of it, and thus also a constituent of history (time), and politics. Grosz uses the example of the body, which, through a perception of itself as a spatial entity, is able to manifest and manipulate its corporeality. To paraphrase Grosz, "a body is what a body can do" [3], and this "doing" depends on its activity in space.

<5> What Doreen Massey has called "power-geometry" [4] also gestures to the instability of spaces, which are imbued with partiality. Not only is space contested, any space is always contingent on the space next to it, and so positionality is dependent upon relations of proximity. Spaces are not only gendered, and sexed, they are also moralised. Crucially, territorial activity is established in the way we live our lives, not just in the political grand gesture but also in the minutiae of existence, and affective relations. Spatial occupation depends on having a consciousness and intent; we need to know -- in Foucault's sense of the power/knowledge axis -- where we are coming from. The strategies and modalities of agency thus become spatial interventions in the field of material culture. Spatial boundaries are moral boundaries that expel the abject, due to the perception of difference as defilement. Thus we are constrained by a subjectivity A that repels not-A. Conversely, definition is also accorded by mutual denial, by materialising the not-A. The routine abhorrence of ambiguity occurs in both the spaces A and not-A. Selves are formed in the erection of boundaries; individuation is a consequence of this manoeuvre. Maintaining the purity of identity involves the splitting off of "good" and "bad" objects, an anxiety based on the idea of self as an essence, and loss of self as defilement. We can see how this procedure is grounded in the masculine reification of insulate segregation, singularity, and autonomy. bell hooks has drawn attention to how this construction is also raced, in that whites invest in an aetiology of sameness, defining any others as not-white [5]. David Sibley, drawing from post-colonial theory, has written about the making of Western culture in which "civilisation" was defined against mapping the defiled, the (moral) deviation of non-European cultures [6]. Identity emerges through (the denial of) difference, through what Ernesto Laclau has called the constitutive outside [7]. This admiration for detachment is also, perhaps inevitably, a prerequisite for domination.

<6> To escape this binary antithesis, black and Asian theorists have been the most instrumental in conceptualising alternatives: Homi Bhabha has talked about "being in the beyond" -- in an intervening space he calls the "Third Space." The Third Space disrupts meaning, referentiality, and enunciation; it is an in-between space which foregrounds hybridity, disarticulating the consensus on signification and meaning predicated on the sovereign notion of self/other: "the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge" [8]. Bhabha invests the boundary with the importance as providing the genesis of presence. He describes "being in the beyond" as "touch[ing] the future on its hither side" [9], as part of a revisionary time which rebounds as a space of intervention in the here and now. The iterative time of the future is a becoming-space where the "in-between" becomes utterable, and can return and be reiterated in the interstices of the present. Post-colonial critics have used their writing to invent this new space that allows the supplementary to emerge. Trinh T. Minh-ha argues how displacement allows the invention of resistant forms of subjectivity:

Displacing is a way of surviving. It is an impossible truthful story of living in-between regimens of truth... Strategies of displacement defy the world of compartmentalisation and the systems of dependence it engenders. [10]

<7> And Gayatri Spivak comments similarly: "the deconstructivist can use herself (assuming one is at one's own disposal) as a shuttle between the center (inside) and the margin (outside) and thus narrate a displacement" [11]. Displacement of the other is able to become displacement of the centre. Signalling from the periphery is a precarious gesture that can provoke the centre into swallowing or spitting the individual out, but it remains forced to respond. All these models propose that some agency or energy be enacted by exclusion, that force generates its own reaction. But outside and liminal spaces are not only reactive they are proactive, they facilitate their own dynamism. Thus "where I stand" can be rearticulated as a position of marginal resistance, reinventing space as a frontier site where political mobilisation occurs. Identity politics becomes not just deconstructive of mechanisms of exclusion, but strategically reconstructive of the spatialising that assigned them there. Thus activists have argued for the construction of new spaces, which are not reducible to the antithetical binary of inside/outside, including recognition of the excluded middle -- in bisexuality perhaps.

<8> However, the outside is a busy place, and the margins are crowded, even these spaces are contested by a range of disparate others; because all spaces abut onto other spaces, the excluded are expected to compete for existence with each other. Identities are the battleground here, and tactically identities have depended on formulating moments of arbitrary closure in order to facilitate struggle. Because identities are always processual, this closure can be seen as strategic and contingent, for example when the state invokes laws against lesbian and gays, provoking many to identify as such for the first time as an intentional strategy of resistance, to strengthen the first line of defence. This is a territorial act. In revising the simple binary of inside/outside space, a fundamental tactic is the attempt to decentre the oppressor: Prathiba Parmar insists that creating identities as black women is not done "in relation to," "in opposition to," or "as a corrective to" but "in and for ourselves" [12]. bell hooks elaborates on the crucial distinction between ascribed marginality and chosen marginality:

It was this [chosen] marginality that I was naming as a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. As such, I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose -- to give up or surrender as part of moving into the centre, but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one's capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds...

I want to say that these margins have been both sites of repression and sites of resistance...

This is an intervention. A message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category coloniser/colonised. Marginality is the space of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there. [13]

What hooks is advocating is spatial praxis as agentic political intervention, a concept first deployed by Henri Lefebvre [14]. She encourages us to reflect upon where we are, and to reflect back that marginalisation. Crucially this activity depends on having a consciousness and an intent: we need to know (in Foucault's sense of the power/knowledge axis), where we are coming from. The issue of relative agency remains, though: when hooks invokes the margins as a space of refusal, one has to question how much choice in this placement there actually is. Crucially, all these political theorists embed the temporal firmly within their spatial praxis, a contextual strategy that has been elided by subsequent commentary, and frequently excluded when deployed within cultural politics.

<9> The intellectual paradigm shift into space was pioneered by Lefebvre, following Bachelard's Poetics of Space (1958), and E.T. Hall's The Hidden Dimension (1966). Lefebvre's lifework consisted of refocusing critical attention onto the condition of being human, specifically the complex structures and expressions concretised in everyday life. He insisted that the ordinary, mundane level of existence contains within it political meaning, and the utopian potential for a fully lived life. In his The Production of Space (La Production de l'espace, 1974) he argued for the importance of understanding how the spatial character of social life cuts across traditional knowledge formations. His peerless interdisciplinary synthesis of Sociology, Philosophy, Linguistics, Geography, and Politics was formally predicated on dialectical materialism, even the dialectical style of his writing infers the spatial aspect of communication. Prefiguring later surges in academic research, he discussed the urban and global spaces of capital, and the politics of human geography. Crucially he criticised the myth that space is transparent, neutral, passive, empty, abstract, and objectively "real," as perpetuated by Euclidean geometry and Kantian ideals of an a priori realm of consciousness. He is bluntly critical of "mental space [that] 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" [15]. So, Lefebvre distinguishes between the representation of space (the "conceived") and the spaces of representation (the "lived"). Instead, he demonstrates his formulation of active, operational, instrumental space: "the role of space, as knowledge and action, in the existing mode of production" [16]. He describes how social space is productive and performative, how it has material effects, how it is first of all lived as a spatial economy. Although he would like to see a science of space, he is resolute on how that analysis must be grounded in the specific, how it must take particular productions of space and examine their definitive properties/dispositions. Key for this project, he argues that "new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa" [17], that social/space is dialectical, and historical, that it sets limits as well as defines outcomes:

(Social) space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder. It is the outcome of a sequence and set of operations, and thus cannot be reduced to the rank of simple object. At the same time there is nothing imagined, unreal or "ideal" about it as compared, for example, with science, representations, ideas or dreams. Itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others. [18]

However, he also warned against conceptual fragmentation, stressing the urgency of needing a clear distinction between an imagined "science of space" on the one hand, and real knowledge of the production of space on the other, of negotiating the tension between structural/symbolic and local/illustrative explanations. From Lefebvre, we have gained an understanding of the turbulence of space, that it is a productive and contradictory force.

<10> Thinking locally -- personally -- prevents us from disassociating ourselves from these potentially distantiating theories of space. It also reminds us that the fashionable rhetorics of identity fragmentation do not come down to our lives being lived as so much circling space-dust; we need models of habitation which respect the somatic and affective integrity of our existence. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus provides us with a model for understanding daily spatial praxis. Habitus is the practice of everyday life, which is written on the body. For Bourdieu the body is a kind of mnemonic device upon which culture is habitually inscribed. So, in Bourdieu's habitus, the bodyspace re-enacts its placement -- according to social taxonomies such as class, gender, and sexuality -- in social frameworks ("the field"); habitus is something that is embodied in the specificities and corporealities of individual lives.

<11> It is important to stress the tangibility, perhaps even the nearness, of these theorisations, in the fact that they rub up against us, become us, in our particular daily lives, in our mannerisms, in our deportment, in the diaphanous moments/movements of our days. These dynamics become naturalised, made invisible by their ubiquity. Space, as understood through the experience of habitus, is something very ordinary, almost preconscious, it frames the way we live and have our being, and it crucially informs the ways we interact with others. As Grosz has written, we need to look at "all social relations in terms of bodies, energies, movements, inscriptions" [19], as relations conditioned by spatial forms.

<12> Both Bourdieu and Lefebvre insisted upon the intellectual necessity of analysing space in relation to the micro-politics of everyday life; both emerged from Leftist French Sociology with its commitment to exposing the deleterious effects of capitalism upon the body: human and politic. Vladimir Lenin and Walter Benjamin were the first to comment upon the spatial characteristics of capitalism, but it was Karl Marx who instigated the idea of the alienated body as a space inscribed by oppression. The body is thus a product of space, and a performance of space, a thing and a process, a configuration of spatial dialectics, crucially a "lived experience" where conceptualisations materialise and are materialised, in historically specific ways. The sphere of everyday life is the dynamic arena of spatial practice, but it is not predetermined as radical, or progressive, or conversely reactionary, or regressive; the spatial practices of everyday life, especially those of the body, are to be exposed and fought over in tactical ways.

<13> Bourdieu has been criticised for posing the habitus as purely ascriptive, or passive, but this neglects to understand how he addresses the issue of the field as an active space, a productive space, which is intrinsically temporal as well. As Lois McNay points out, the habitus is more than the sedimentation of disciplinary effects upon the body. This figuration needs to be balanced with "a consideration of the protensive dimension of the living through of embodied norms in praxis" [20]. Protensive in the sense of potential futures inscribed within the present. Bourdieu's concept of the habitus is generative, productive, and relational, it is an "open system of dispositions" [21]. McNay compares it to Judith Butler's idea of performative agency through repetition, a materialisation in which reproduction and challenge simultaneously exist. All three of these critics see the activity of the body in time as an interpretive and anticipatory process, the execution of a practical mastery that recognises its own constraints.

<14> Foucault's assertion that we are living in an epoch (time) of space contains an interesting paradox: that we cannot theorise space without time. Whilst contemporary cultural theory has enthused about space, it has often failed to address its temporal context with the same vigour, being given to interpret space as a kind of static void, deprived of political content. The present is troubled: Fredric Jameson, for example, sees the postmodern as characterised by a spatiality of "chaotic depthlessness" [22]. Within the endless proliferation of the commodified present, past and future have been subsumed to the apparently voracious desire to have things now; it is a fairly terrifying simultaneity. Space without time is a disabled concept -- a moving body occupies space, but these spaces are not fixed moments with individually recoverable co-ordinates: they are acts of duration, of space-in-time. The moving body has succeeded in being (spatial) and becoming (temporal), by expressing duration, a concept of Bergson's that is elaborated by Ann Game:

A moving body occupies successive positions in space, but the process by which it moves from one position to another is one of duration which eludes space (Bergson 1950: 111). Motion itself, the act, is not divisible, only an object is; space which is motionless can be measured but the motion of bodies cannot. Movements cannot occupy space, they are duration...To think of a body occupying points in space is to do so from a perspective outside the body, not from the perspective of the moving body. To be in the body is to be in time. [23]

There is a particular meaning of time being deployed here, one that is experienced as a body in motion, which in Bergson's formulation is a kind of creative evolution. As Game discusses it, this evolution is a process without an end, it is a proliferation of experience without finality or conclusion, and it is a kind of infinite differentiation without negativity or denial. As she says, Bergson's theory of time is compatible with positive desire, reproducing itself for its own sake, moving for pleasure. There is an attitude of openness that infuses it. It is an entering of time, rather than a measurement of it. This is to deconstruct the binary of time/space, where they collapse to form a moving present, it is "space that it is lived and is transformed by imagination" [24].

<15> The present, though, is also utopian: utopian desires attempt to change the present by integrating possible futures; the quality of hope transforms this present. The recognition that possible futures are latent within the present simultaneously enables belonging and becoming. This is not about predicting a future, neither does it resort to a myth of inevitable progress: It is about animating a kind of optimism, philosopher Ernst Bloch's "anticipatory consciousness" -- a consciousness of possibilities that have not yet been, but could eventually be realised. Utopias are not fixed entities, or static spaces; they generate utopian thinking, or speculations, the reader's own projection of, and response to, desires for a better present. These desires are never "utopian" in the derogatory sense of too distanced to be real, they are very real, and express a yearning, a movement towards possibilities. Utopian desires lean into potential futures, and in doing so those futures elaborate the present; they create moments of transition. If we reconsider Louis Althusser's definition of "ideology" -- "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" [25] -- we can conceive how necessarily compelling this re-visioning of the present, in opening up potential futures and spaces, becomes.

Foucault-Space

<16> Foucault died before the Internet was born as a global communication network. One wonders what he would have made of it. In his later work he discusses technologies of the self, and perhaps the present euphoria of identity-play in electronic cultures would have been the logical development -- the (dis)embodiment -- of this self-fashioning. His words are just too temptingly prophetic. Here he introduces his concept of heterotopias, which he saw as

something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. [26]

Heterotopias are kinds of mirrors to utopias, a counterpoint of the real to the unreal, in which the utopic glance returns to reconstruct the real, in a new way of seeing. Heterotopias are the conceptual space in which we live, six principles of which are identified by Edward Soja [27]: i) they are found in all cultures, although no type is universal; ii) they change over time, they have a genealogy and well as a geography; iii) they are dynamic places where many different, incompatible spaces/sites may intersect; iv) they can occur at particular temporal and spatial axes; iv) they presuppose systems of territorial opening and closing which makes them subject to the disciplinary technologies of power; vi) they function in relation to the spaces around them, either through the creation of an illusion or out of the sensibilities of compensation. Heterotopias allow a slippage of meaning, they

make it impossible to name this and that... because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy syntax in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things... to "hold together..." [heterotopias] desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of language at its sources; they dissolve our myths, sterilise the lyricism of sentences. [28]

It is this juxtaposition that produces a kind of space-play, out of which can emanate a new kind of semiotic, new practices, and by extension, new kinds of identities and subjectivities. They are simultaneously, and paradoxically, here, and nowhere; perhaps they can be best described as an enabling idea that permits the imagination to reconfigure space, rather than affording a real place we can actually go to:

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein [29].

This comment that -- "our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time" -- needs to be interpreted as observational rather than as an endorsement. Foucault was writing before the explosion of critical attention on space, and is attempting to contextualise space, and to redress an historical blindness.

<17> Well known for proposing two models of space in his writing, Foucault postulates heterotopias, and reinvigorates Jeremy Bentham's panopticon as a wider metaphor for social organisation and regulation. However, Foucault's writing is replete with spatial analysis, from the banishment of the lepers and the journeying of the Ship of Fools in Madness and Civilisation, to the spatial distribution of disease in The Birth of the Clinic, to the visual and territorial practices of punishment in Discipline and Punish; as he comments elsewhere: "discipline is above all an analysis of space" [30]. Foucault, by grounding his writings in the material and metaphorical operations of space, could be described as a spatial historian [31]. In this, Foucault has been influenced by prior philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, who insisted that time and space be more integrated as time-space, understood as dwelling in the present presence, the "moment-site" [Augenblicksstätte] [32]. Stuart Elden describes how Foucault has deployed spatial language throughout his works, drawing from Heidegger, that

Rather than conceive of historical changes as a linear development, Foucault suggests that the "domain of the modern episteme should be represented rather as a volume of space open in three dimensions...[an] epistemological trihedron." These examinations lead Foucault to one of his most celebrated formulations, suggesting that "the human is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end." [33]

Here Foucault is embarking on a project to redefine the human as a spatial invention, the narrative shift of his writing is to move away from subjection through spatial regulation, he was keen to communicate a concept of space that engendered hope. Foucault, in his later work, turned from a focus on subjection to revitalise agency and play. In the later writings, Foucault brings in his notion of "technologies of the self," specifically in the second volume of A History of Sexuality [34]. He explains that in addition to deliberately setting ethical rules of conduct, these practices of the self involve the change and transformation of life through an art of existence. This stylisation of the self involved the creation of something distinctive through strenuous activity, through labour. "Taking care of oneself was not a rest cure," he comments, it is "a true social practice...an intensification of social relations" [35]. Foucault saw these elaborate and rigorous cultivations of self as agentic, not just for the individual, but also importantly, for the communal, social body too. He spoke about the technologies of the self as producing a "space of freedom," the site of a radical alterity, which, as David Halperin puts it: "is the space within each human being where she or he encounters the not-self, the beyond" [36]. To clarify, this self is not a private interiority to be explored/discovered, but an attempt to realise oneself by cultivating a kind of transcendence of origins, something that is achieved relationally through multiple interventions with the present and imagined futures.

<18> Foucault saw the homosexual as peculiarly positioned to maximise this radical potential, specifically because s/he has historically been indeterminate, and thus discursively more open to resignification (and one might comment: how much more this is true of lesbians than gay men). In that sense, being non-intelligible logically potentialises new identities to form, allowing indeterminacy to wriggle out from under the pall of subjection. Foucault indicts us to invent new freedoms, through collective self-fashioning. He argued that it is our culture, our way of life, our savoir-faire, which poses the threat to heteronormativity, more so than our sexual acts. He argues:

"No! Let's escape as much as possible from the type of relations which society proposes for us and try to create in the empty space where we are new relational possibilities." By proposing a new relational right, we will see that non-homosexual people can enrich their lives by changing their own schema of relations. [37]

Virtuality is a structuring concept here. Leaving aside for a moment Foucault's rhetorical invocation of an "empty space" -- as if a thing were possible -- we need to recognise the utopian motif for such an impulsion, as he says, for all people. Within the visible economy of being, the space of representation, there are powerful stencils for predetermining selfhood. However, and this is a key principle, those subject positions, through their own precarious repetition, create spillage, slippage, blurs. The creative arts understand the importance of the mistake, the error, the accidental eruption, the beautiful flaw, and Foucault is gesturing to these and adding an injunction to imaginative and deliberate intent: to actively queer aesthetics, whatever your sexuality. Foucault, of course, argued that the acquisition of intelligible selfhood in the modern era is distinctively imbricated with sexual identity, and that the varied techniques deployed are not without cost.

<19> In order to have an aesthetics of existence, one must have a consciousness of temporal emergence -- in Foucault's terminology, a knowledge of the dispositif. The active reflection that Foucault espouses has to contain comparative spatio-temporal dimensions, where the self both projects (future) and introjects (past). The self negotiates both the spatial and the temporal in order to have a sense of individuation; indeed, "losing one's bearings" through insanity or mental illness is symptomatic of the "loss" of this self, or identity. The modern bounded self has to manage intelligibility of itself through time, and it achieves this through narrative, through becoming the "hero" of its own story. The self is very durable. Techniques of the self, such as writing (confession, diary, autobiography), render the self visible and plausible to itself, and to others. Writing performs a Deleuzian folding, in which the folding of the outside into the inside actually creates intelligible interiority. Over time, this re-iteration accrues the force of a plot, it is retrospectively submitted to a sense of ordering, it is made to mean, it contains narrative devices such as cause and effect, heroes and villains, major themes, disruptions, and the emplotment of random events. These elements cohere into the thing we call "a life." This is not to say, incidentally, that the "self" being produced is a fiction, in the pejorative sense of the word, nor is it simply a sum of habits.

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<20> Techniques of the self are deployed in order to disclose or repress what we might call an "authentic" self, something that we hold to as an ideal, that we believe is graspably there, as both material and potential. The authentic self is instrumental to a sense of being-in-the-world, but it does not necessarily follow that relations with others are therefore purely instrumental; the authentic self is intrinsically a dialogic self, it is formed through interaction with context, through backdrops of significance. It is encouraged to monitor and improve itself, to become a moral self. An intelligible self cannot be generated in isolation. As Charles Taylor summarises:

We are embodied agents, living in dialogical conditions, inhabiting time in a specifically human way, that is, making sense of our lives as a story that connects the past from which we have come to our future projects. [38]

He communicates well a sense of agency; added to that is the incredible, precious, non-repeatable, non-interchangeable uniqueness that each human body has in its life, its brief occupation of Space/Time. One of the problems with current critical thinking is that we often espouse it with a double consciousness: we teach that we are victims of a vast linguistic conspiracy, seeking to outline the predictability of our responses, beliefs, and actions, yet we also believe that as intellectuals, we have escaped the dehumanisation that is implied -- we have relative specialness -- we are different. Nobody is the same, and to impute same-ness to groups of people is most often to denigrate them, and diminish them. There is another subtle deployment of sameness that occurs within the self that is temporal, in which the protagonist of selfhood believes that she is the same person in the past that she is in the present, and will be in the future, a story of evolvement that "belongs" to that person. In part this incorporation is due to embodiment, although our bodies change, it is within its parameters that we are born and die. Intelligible selfhood depends upon this continuity. However, this involves compaction and an elision; the self processes memory selectively. The mind is not a video library, the retrieval of repressed memories is a notoriously unstable process, fragmentary and scrambled historical associations are aroused and reassembled to fit the present -- to a present, postmodern self that is "true" in only an unstable sense. The "psychopathology of everyday life" consists of the re-combination of mental/psychical and somatic traces that are translated into meaning, made intelligible by the emotional exigencies of the reflective self, a self that needs to act.

<21> In a broader sense, recent critical theory has reduced subjectivity to a spatial dimension, yet it is through time, and specifically through the narrativisation of that temporal dimension, that a sense of self and agency occurs. Identity has become the privileged modus operandi of political articulation in the West, conferring civic membership; it is not without its pleasures and benefits. Identity confers visibility, and much of the rhetoric of identity movements over the past thirty years has appropriated spatial tactics in the public sphere, articulating this desire for presence. Minority movements have also depended on a strong historical imperative for validation: Think of the cultural expansion of women's history, Black history, Lesbian and Gay history, their perceived necessity for a shared, written past underpinning an idea of validity and entitlement. However, visibility also makes one a target of regulation. Representing oneself involves risk, living with the discomfort of non-intelligibility can also be productive, but the practical reality of exclusion must not be romanticised. We have seen, after Foucault, the importance of understanding the genealogy of the subject, that any negotiation of agency requires an understanding of the historical vicissitudes of power, neatly summarised as:

Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, an historical ontology of ourselves through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, an historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents. [39]

Roughly following the three phases of his own writing, these three domains of enquiry stress the co-implication of time with agency: we need to know where we have come from (spatially/temporally) in order to facilitate the future. The emergence of enunciation, the self to claim, must be understood processually. Foucault sees these "enunciative modalities" as sites/spaces of emergence in which political identities are formed [40]. Certainly Foucault attempted to describe the limits of what could be said through discursive intervention, drawing attention to how resistance is made intelligible to its protagonists and adversaries alike, in a dynamic, dialectical movement. Through the meticulous mechanism of spatial regulation such as enclosure, partitioning, and rank, the subject is provided a place to speak; through the calibrated truths of temporal discipline such as timetabling, serialization, and the imposition of clock-time, the subject is accorded a moment to speak in. Docile bodies indeed. Except, here we have Foucault the optimist: "I firmly believe in human freedom," a freedom, he claims, that is made possible by the use of counter-memory [41]. Counter-memory liberates us from particular subjectivities by a process of reflection and recognition, we begin to know that that which is posed as truth, is an optional way of being. Thus counter-memory becomes a deliberate process of forgetting who we are, a state of continual self-transformation. The opportunity to transform the self is achieved through a network of relations; one self is positioned in reciprocity to many other selves, some more influential than others, all circulating within certain fields of force. Thus, through interaction and repetition, incitation and struggle is continuously a possibility; in spite of -- because of -- identity ascription, there is always the prospect of "refusing what we are."

<22> The subject is a historically contingent effect, but to see ourselves as purely victims of historical and spatial imperatives is to limit our understanding of what it is to be human. It also diminishes the extent to which we can hold ourselves, and each other, responsible for our actions as moral, sentient beings. Recent political theory has rightly focussed on identity in this respect, but it has fetishised identity (and often its corollary, non-identity) as the only route to power. By activating an abiding suspicion of the identitarian and symbolic compulsions of discourse, we may begin to understand what we are. Simultaneously this understanding can make routes towards agency possible, by promising us a coherent, embodied, intelligible self -- the more elusive issue of who we are. Personhood requires this kind of sense. Think how we have tried to know the Other, in an attempt to mobilise power/knowledge: is it not time to know our own power, in order to have consciousness, and an ethical conscience, of our own effects? One consequence of rejecting the passivity of the subject involves accepting a notion of the accountable self, something that theorists underestimated. Relinquishing a primarily spatial model of identity might also have a corresponding outcome: that our acknowledgment of, and critical, reflexive engagement with, real difference permits a less etiolated understanding of the Other.

<23> In confounding the spatialised estrangement of Self/Other I want to turn to the work of Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero. Her book Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood has recently been translated and introduced by Paul A. Kottman, who includes an excellent introduction to Cavarero's thinking. Cavarero engages with current -- one might say forestalled -- Anglo-American work on identity, principally re-turning us to look back at the idea of a self, and through it an appreciation of what she prosaically calls the "you." Cavarero writes generically complex tales of the narratable self, reviving the writerly tradition of Roland Barthes, and echoing his recognition of eros, love, and desire. Drawing also from Hannah Arendt, Cavarero is also keen to revivify notions of individual "who"ness, in recalling the uniquess of each human story. However, Cavarero doesn't reproduce the Cartesian remoteness so preponderant in modern versions of the self. Her self is distinctive, but entirely dependent upon the love, recognition, and narration of the other, the person she calls "you." This is an intimate relation, a fragile one, a consensual exchange of knowing/being that does not depend on the spatial economics of displacement. Kottman describes this structure in Cavarero's work by imagining a dialogue between her and Butler, one of the key contemporary proponents of linguistic subjectivity: Butler describes the formation of the subject as structured by the constitutive outside, the excluded and abjected other. Despite repudiation, precisely because the other is constitutive, it thus becomes the necessary "inside" of the subject. Whereas in Butler's work this relationship is fundamentally one of subjection, in Cavarero this is figured more along the lines of the "gift," the gift of narratability is bestowed in the generous recognition of another, not an Other in a distantiating sense, but another in the sense of a singular living human relationship (such as a parent, a lover, a friend, indeed Cavarero uses all of these examples). Whereas Butler begins by insisting that subjection is the prerequisite for intelligibility, which in turn is the precondition for speaking as individuals, for "Cavarero, as for Arendt, the intelligibility of the unique existent is not "first established in language," but rather he/she is a flesh and blood existent whose unique identity is revealed ex post facto through the words of his or her life story" [42]. Both Butler and Kottman, commentating on Caverero, point out the circular paradox of the subject, noting Butler's observation that the subject has to create its own estranged and ghosted third person "other" in order to tell its own story. However, Caverero, in a gesture that underlines sociality, prefers instead to argue that the narratable self desires this story from the mouth of another (person). Rather than stressing the desire for intelligibility in this self-story, Caverero emphasises the desire for familiarity, and for ownership of one's story through the essential uniqueness of each person's storia told within the dwelling-time, the existence of the life itself:

It is this sense of being narratable -- quite apart from the content of the narration itself -- and the accompanying sense that others are also narratable selves with unique stories, which is essential to the self, and which makes it possible to speak of a unique being that is not simply a subject. [43]

Through the linguistic interpellation of the subject, alienation is produced due to the indifference of the process, producing "the feeling that who one is, is not being addressed, and indeed has no place in the name-calling scene at all" [44]. As Foucault has said, "Discourse is not life; its time is not yours" [45], Cavarero articulates this gap, between life and language (the one that Butler allows for resignificatory practices), between life and the tale, as being filled with desire. This allows Caverero to reconfigure the political:

If one understands "politics" in Arendt's sense, argues Cavarero -- that is, as a "plural and interactive space of exhibition" -- then the scene of narration, of telling each other life-stories, takes on the character of political action. Moreover, through such a suspension of the disjunction between discourse and life, it becomes possible to imagine a relational politics that is attentive to who one is, rather than what one is. [46]

Cavarero uses the model of the lover to help us understand the interdependence of agency and selfhood, noting the way that lovers engage in reciprocal narrations to empower each other, to bring each "to be" in co-appearance. Cavarero's argument demands a much closer reading, as she summarises in the title of her last chapter: The World is Full of Stories Just Waiting to be Told.

Heading

<24> In imagining new futures, it is strategic to reject a view of ourselves as neutrally immersed in a present beyond our control, determination, or hope. Latent within much of the writing on space is an integrative time that can produce agentic models of selfhood amenable to political potential. Let us overcome reactive subjectivity, and produce instead active forms of the self that fully inhabit time in a reinvigorated manner, let us rediscover vitalism, and, moving through spatial economics towards the future, ask, with Grosz:

What would an ethics be like that, instead of seeking a mode of equivalence, a mode of reciprocity or calculation, sought to base itself on absolute generosity, absolute gift, expenditure without return, a pure propulsion into a future that does not rebound with echoes of an exchange dictated by the past? [47]

For this ethical sense of political agency we need to re-engage a modernist sense of time with a postmodern emphasis on space, integrate our understanding of the two, and rework our dwelling place within the present. Having an intelligible self to claim occurs in closing that gap with the other, and co-producing you and I.

Notes

[1] FOUCAULT, "Of Other Spaces" in Diacritics Spring, 1986:22-7, quoted in SOJA Edward W. "Heterotopologies" in WATSON Sophie & GIBSON Katherine Postmodern Cities and Spaces Blackwells, Oxford, 1995: 13-34. [^]

[2] GROSZ Elizabeth Space, Time, and Perversion Routledge, New York, 1995, p.92.
Ibid. p.214. [^]

[3] MASSEY Doreen "Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place" in J. BIRD, B. CURTIS, T. PUTTNAM, G. ROBERTSON, and L. TICKNER (eds) Mapping the Futures Routledge, London, 1993. [^]

[4] hooks bell Black Looks: Race and Representation Turnaround Press, London, 1992. [^]

[5] SIBLEY David Geographies of Exclusion Routledge, London, 1995. [^]

[6] LACLAU Ernesto New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our Time Verso, London, 1990. [^]

[7] BHABHA Homi "The Third Space" in RUTHERFORD Jonathan (ed) Identity, Community, Culture, Difference Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1990:207-221, p. 211. [^]

[8] BHABHA Homi The Location of Culture Routledge, London, 1994: 7. [^]

[9] MINH-HA Trinh T. "Cotton and Iron" in FERGUSON Russell, GEVER Martha, MINH-HA Trinh T. & WEST Cornel (eds) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures The New Museum of Contemporary Art / M.I.T. Press, New York,1990: 327-336, p.331-3. [^]

[10] SPIVAK Gayatri "Explanation and Culture: Marginalia" in ibid. pp. 377-394, p.381. [^]

[11] PARMAR Prathiba "Black Feminism: the Politics of Articulation" in RUTHERFORD op. cit. pp. 101-26, p.101. [^]

[12] PARMAR Prathiba "Black Feminism: the Politics of Articulation" in RUTHERFORD op. cit. pp. 101-26, p. 101. [^]

[13] HOOKS ibid. pp. 149-52. [^]

[14] LEFEBVRE Henri The Production of Space Blackwell, Oxford, 1991. [^]

[15] LEFEBVRE Henri The Production of Space Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell, Oxford, (1974) 1991: 6. [^]

[16] Ibid. p.11. [^]

[17] Ibid. p.59. [^]

[18] Ibid. p.73. [^]

[19] GROSZ Elizabeth "Refiguring Lesbian Desire" in op cit. p.182. [^]

[20] MCNAY Lois Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000:31. [^]

[21] BOURDIEU Pierre An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992: 133, quoted in Ibid p.44. [^]

[22] JAMESON Fredric Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, London, 1991, quoted in MASSEY Doreen Space, Place, and Gender Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994, p.251. [^]

[23] Ibid. p.95. [^]

[24] GAME Ann "Time, Space, Memory, with Reference to Bachelard" in FEATHERSTONE Mike, LASH Scott, & ROBERTSON Roland Global Modernities Sage Publications, London, 1995, pp. 192-208, p.200. She is referring to BERGSON H. Time and Free Will Trans. F.L. POGSON, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1950. [^]

[25] ALTHUSSER Louis "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays Trans. B. BREWSTER Monthly Review Press, New York, 1971, pp. 127-87, p.162. [^]

[26] FOUCAULT Michel (1986) ibid. p.24. [^]

[27] SOJA Edward W. "Heterotopologies" in WATSON S. & GIBSON K. op cit. pp. 13-34. [^]

[28] FOUCAULT Michel The Order of Things Vintage, New York, 1980, p. xvii. [^]

[29] FOUCAULT Michel "Of Other Spaces," p.17. [^]

[30] FOUCAULT Michel Madness and Civilisation Trans. Richard Howard (abridged). London, Routledge, 1967. FOUCAULT Michel The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception Trans. Alan Sheridan. London, Routledge, 1973. FOUCAULT Michel Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Trans. Alan Sheridan. London, Routledge, 1973. FOUCAULT Michel Dits et Ecrits 1954-1988 Edited by Daniel Defert & Francois Ewald, Paris, Gallimard, Four Volumes, Vol. 3 1994:515. [^]

[31] A new book by Stuart Elden does in fact describe him as such, in ELDEN Stuart Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History London & New York, Continuum, 2001. [^]

[32] HEIDEGGER Martin Contributions to Philosophy: From Enkowing Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999:235. Quoted in Elden ibid. [^]

[33] Ibid. p.98. The quotations are from FOUCAULT Michel The Order of Things- An Archaeology of the Human Sciences Trans. Alan Sheridan. London, Routledge, 1970:346-7. [^]

[34] FOUCAULT Michel The Use of Pleasure Trans. Robert Hurley. New York, Random House, 1985. [^]

[35] FOUCAULT Michel The Care of the Self Trans. Robert Hurley. New York, Random House, 1986:50-54. [^]

[36] HALPERIN David M. Saint=Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995 p.75. [^]

[37] BARBEDETTE "The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will" pp.38-9. Quoted in Ibid. p.100, original emphasis. [^]

[38] TAYLOR Charles The Ethics of Authenticity Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1991:105. [^]

[39] FOUCAULT Michel "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress" in DREYFUS H. & RABINOW P. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1982:237. [^]

[40] FOUCAULT Michel "The Formation of Enunciative Modalities" in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith) New York, Pantheon Books 1972: 50-56. [^]

[41] FOUCAULT Michel & BAKER Catherine "Interview with Michel Foucault" Actes 45-46, June 1984:5. [^]

[42] Paul A. Kottman "Translator's Introduction" in CAVARERO Adriana Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London & New York, Routledge, 2000:xiii. [^]

[43] Ibid. p. xvi, original emphasis. [^]

[44] Ibid. p. xix. [^]

[45] Cited in ibid. p. xx. [^]

[46] Ibid. p. xxiii. [^]

[47] GROSZ Elizabeth Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1999:11. [^]