Society–Space

Our conception of society–space determines the vantage point from which we critique and transform the social world; the subjects and processes we deem significant; and their relation to a social whole. This article treats four broad frameworks engaged by geographers, each providing distinct conceptual insights about society and space. In the first, a Marxist view of inequity, society–space is a ‘structured coherence’ – a sociospatial formation, whose territorial boundaries approximate politicojuridical boundaries. Geographers’ work on the sociospatial dialectic, spatial fix, and time–space compression have leavened understandings of the spatial dynamics in this approach. The second, a post-structuralist/Foucauldian approach, sees society–space as a ‘strategic field’. Space forms part of the technology of governance that constitutes subjects either as normal/abnormal, legal/illegal, or through states of exception – such as the enemy noncombatant or the illegal alien. In the third, a post-structuralist/feminist approach, society–space is seen as a ‘performative field’ in which subjects negotiate doubled positions and paradoxical spaces – affording insights into larger societal constructs such as the gendering of public/private spheres; racialized people’s passing in a white world; or transsexuals performance of sexuality. In the fourth, a Deleuzian approach, society–space is an ‘immanent field’ in which subjects continuously transform themselves, hybridizing, engaging in acts of conjunction, connection, or collaboration with their milieu. Society–space is understood as stabilizing from the composite lattice of practices that are coded and channeled into a kind of social machine.