SPATIAL REFERENCE IN SOCIAL PERCEPTION

SPATIAL REFERENCE IN SOCIAL PERCEPTION

written for Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Methodologies, Imagining Alternatives
subsection: Creating Objects, Developing Methodologies

ASCA International Workshop
Amsterdam, March 28-30, 2007


INTRODUCTION/ABSTRACT

References to space and place are often tacit in social constructions of the reality of one's surroundings. Individuals imagine themselves to be situated within a territory, physical-geographical and social-cultural which they project values and expectations about the nature of reality, social and natural. Expressions such as "when in Rome, do as the Romans," "the language of the land," and so forth testify to this logic. We imagine multiple societies and 'cultures' in the world, and we often imagine that individuals inhabit them, yet why should we assume that we are in one society and not another at a particular moment? Why do we assume that space/territory is singular and homogeneous between borders? Although some would claim that such perception is rooted in our cognitive nature, this need not be the case. Instead, we can look at knowledge of space and place as constructed through discourses and habitually applied conceptual schemas.

The logic of separate cultural spaces is one such schema. By learning political geography we develop from a young age the sense that nation-states and other geographical regions are separate and different. The use of contrasting colors as geographical pedagogy extends beyond map-reading to influence our sense of heterogeneity across borders and homogeneity within. Further we are taught that the people living 'here' have this culture and those living 'there' have that one, and in doing so we learn to accept the logic that space, territory, and culture are naturally linked. Later we go on to consume these differences and the eroticized separations they represent. And when we are far from a border, our sense of familiarity, homogeneity, and borderlessness is constructed in the shadow of experiences of spatial difference.

In studies of race and ethnicity, whiteness has appeared on the map as an uncharted territory. Although we know that whiteness has much to do with invisibility where racial/ethnic identification is concerned, visualizing such invisibility can be more difficult. Understanding references to space as cultural- or ethnic- space provide a key to understanding the invisibility of whiteness. The system of political territorialization of space as ethnically-defined nations, regions, cities, buildings and so forth has facilitated the performance of ethnicity through deference to a particular vision of one's surroundings. Thus for whites, how one makes-sense-of and orients-to one's surrounding space-territory is more important ethnic capital than expressions of self or body. Negotiating 'realistic' meanings about the surrounding space(s) and ensuring deference to the authority of realism as well as to the (imagined) master(s) of spaces is a crucial element in expressing white ethnicity.

The logic of spatial territory is reproduced in many ways throughout various discourses but certain modes of sociology, as well as other social sciences, warrant particular attention. The idea that there are populations and subgroups in societies to study as aggregates implicitly reproduce spatial-territoriality by virtue of the way that they construct, a priori, their objects of study. When we deal with demographics and percentages, we need a particular whole as referent for the fragmentation we are describing. When we talk about groups in society and their political interactions, we need a shared political-economic field as well as a sense that individuals are inherently related to the groups we use to make sense of them. Rarely do we acknowledge the radical situatedness of our vision and consider how fragmented social reality really is at the empirical level.

In order to move beyond the cognitive trap of imagining social life in terms of bounded territories and aggregates, I propose an alternative vision derived from the Deleuzian concepts of assemblage, rhizome, and (de)territorialization. In this paper I will explore these concepts and compare them with sociological concepts such as society, population, race, group, sub-group, macro, micro and so forth paying attention to implicit assumptions about what we are capable of knowing tacit in these analytical concepts. In addition I will explore how moving between (abstract) sociological knowledge and (concrete) empirical perceptions and experiences allows individuals to construct synthetic socialized/ethnicized spaces that make it possible for them to function as semi-passive agents of white ethnicity. In addition I will propose an alternative understanding of ethnicity and culture that is inter-agential rather than spatially grounded in the logic of container-contents (i.e. a cultural agent is contained within a culture). Finally I will discuss how the Deleuzian concepts above can be applied in order to rethink ethnicity and culture in this way.