space

Phase space

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Phase space: (or state space) Allows representation of the behaviour of a system in geometric form. The number of dimensions required for the phase space is a function of the "degrees of freedom" of the system.
A dynamical system consists in two parts: the notions of a state (the essential information about a system) and a dynamic (a rule that describes how the state evolves with time). This evolution can be visualized in a phase space. Phase spaces can have any number of dimensions, corresponding to the “degrees of freedom” of the system. The figures drawn in the phase space that describe the system's behavior are phase portraits.

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heimlich / unheimlich

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"With Freud indeed, foreignness, an uncanny one, creeps into the tranquility of reason itself...Henceforth, we know that we are foreigners to ourselves, and it is with the help of that sole support that we can attempt to live with others." (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 170)

In an article published in 1906, the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch published "Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen ", an essay on the uncanny as an affective excitement -- a sensation of unease, of disorientation, of not being quite "at home" -- which a "fortunate formation" of the German language conveys quite clearly, since Heim specifically refers to the home. Thus, for Jentsch the experience of the new, the foreign, and the unusual can provoke mistrust, unease, and even hostility, as opposed to the familiar forms of the traditional, the usual, the hereditary which are a source of comfort and reassurance. While the familiar may even appear self-evident, the unfamiliar can create uncertainty and disorientation, and threats to the everyday sense of intellectual mastery. While the intensity of feeling associated with this disorientation can vary considerably, the sense of the uncanny is most particularly aroused in conditions of "doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate." (The point is taken up by Freud in Das Unheimliche ) Fear, terror, and horror can result. The impression of the uncanny is often provoked by wax figures, automata, panopticons, and panoramas, and in recent years the "uncanny valley" has been proposed to explain the unease that lifelike robots can provoke -- almost but not quite animate.

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non-place

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For Marc Augé, a non-place comes into existence when human beings do not recognise themselves in it. (see place / identity) Non-places begin with uprootedeness -- uprooted nineteenth century countrymen, migrants, refugees, etc. They provide the "passive joys of identity loss." While anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality. (p.94) Thus a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place, and these non-places are the real measure of our time. (pp.77-79) 

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personal space

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Here is where I can write in the first person. So this discursive space, at least, can be thought of as personal, as a place of private defintion, grudgingly aware as I may be that my private sphere is socially formed.

Although Phenomenology holds little intellectual appeal these days (its point of view seems naive, its universalizing subjectivity too suspect) I still feel that there should be a place for reporting and sifting through one's own experience. (getting their feel?)

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psycho-sexual space

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In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud warned the reader against the view of the mind as physically spatial. Such an error would be mistaking "the scaffold" for "the building". Yet his "topographical" accounts of the unconsious are thoroughly spatial.

One of the earliest reflexes of a breast-fed newborn is to turn its head towards the person, male or female, who is holding it in the nursing position (that is, in a horizontal position. Later, the baby will stare at the face of the mother unwaveringly during the act of nursing. During this time she feels the nipple in her mouth while at the same time she sees the mother's face. Ren Spitz describes this experience as the origins of the distinction between contact perception (oral tactile) and distance perception, between haptic and optic perception.

The dyad of reciprocal relations between mother and child, between object and subject, are the first form of "object relations," which later become social relations. Karl Abraham invented the term of "object relations" to describe persons or things which mediate instinctual discharge for a given person. Melanie Klein developed the theory in relation to the mother as principal object and used children's play as a basis for understanding their cognition. D.W. Winnecott describes the holding environment, the "potential space" between the baby and the mother that comes into being during the phase of repudiation, when the baby is at a stage of separating out the mother from the self and the mother is lowering the degree of adaptation to the baby's needs. (He also compares this moment to late stages of psychiatric treatment) Confidence in the mother's reliability, and therefore in that of other people and things, makes possible a separating-out of the not-me from the me. The move from dependence to autonomy is achieved by the filling in of the potential space with creative playing, with the use of symbols, and with all that eventually adds up to a cultural life. (Playing and Reality, pp 107-9)

Jessica Benjamin links the intersubjective realm of the holding environment and transitional experience to the experience of inner self, which she sees as enabling the experience of women's desire. ("A Desire of One's Own, in Teresa de Lauretis, ed. Feminist Studies / Critical Studies) see body.

The analysis of the mirror stage accounts for the child's aquisition of notions of spatiality and temporality. (see also ego)For the first time, the child is not absorbed by its environment (both occupying no space at all and being all-pervasive) but is now part of space, taking up a place or location in space. The "buccal" space of the neonate, the space that can be contained in or exploited by the child's mouth, is replaced with the first notion of a binarized space, capable of being divided into real and virtual planes. The virtual duplication of the subject's body, the creation of a symmetry measured from the picture plane, is necessary for these more sophisticated, abstract, and derivative notions of spatiality. (see body image.)The mirror stage is a link between space and representation.

J.-B. Pontalis observed that Charcot's space at the Salpetri re was a full, theatrical space -- which is, in fact, the space of the hysteric -- which Freud replaced with an empty, purely mental space. The analyst sat out of sight of the patient, who reclined on a couch without the presence of any other spectators. ("Between Freud and Charcot: from One Scene to the Other" , in Frontiers in Psychoanalysis)

In "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia" (first published in Minotaure in 1935 and playing a crucial role in Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. published in English in October 31, Winter 1984) Roger Caillois talks about "depersonalization by assimilation into space" in both psychosis and animal mimicry. (see bwo) Schizophrenic thought is "adualistic"; lack of ego boundaries makes it impossible to set limits to the process of identification with the environment.

Surrealism and the city as the place of chance (and magical) encounter. "Ce qui me s duit dans une telle mani re de voir, c'est qu'a perte de vue elle est recr atrice de d sir" (Andr Breton, L'Amour Fou) magnetic fields as the actions of desire.

sacred / profane

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"Surrounded by a world full of wonder and vigour, whose laws man will never understand (though he may sense their existence and long to know them), a world which reaches him in a few interrupted chords that leave his soul unsatisfied, man conjures into being the perfection that he lacks, and, creating a miniature world where the cosmic laws, though restricted, may appear complete in themselves, he gratifies the cosmogonic instinct within him." (Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonishen K nsten.)

"During the Middle Ages, spatial relations tended to be organized as symbols and values. The highest object in the city was the church spire, which pointed toward heaven and dominated all the lesser buildings, as the church dominated their hopes and fears." (Mumford, "the Monastery and the Clock"

Mircea Eliade locates the primary spatializing impulse of architecture the demarcation of sacred from profane. He studies sacred space and the ritual building of human habitation as parts of the modality of sacred experience. For Eliade, the sacred and the profane are two modalities of experience, each with its own world. The former experience takes place in a sacralized cosmos, while the latter desacralizes the world in order to assume a profane existence. An echo of this distinction is to be found in the relationship between philosophy and poetry. (see truth )

In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga, linking play to ritual, also emphasizes spatial separation from everyday life. (In a structuralist perspective, play and ritual are inverses of each other. eg. see time)

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scientific space

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"I do not believe that there exists anything in external bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, etc. except size, shape, quantity, and motion." (Galileo Galilei, On Motion, p.48) When Galileo proposed his doctrine of subject and object and the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, he established the scientific prejudgement that the concept of space is of something geometrical and not differentiated qualitatively.

Newtonian "absolute space" was based on a realist conception of mathematics (see Jammer p. 95) To Newton, mathematics, particularly geometry, is not a purely hypothetical system of propositions...instead geometry is nothing but a special branch of mechanics. Newton's first law of motion, which links change in motion with force requires an absolute (or inertial?) framework. It requires a distinction between absolute motion and relative motion and links force to a change in absolute motion. For example, as the train pulls away from the station, the station may appear to be moving and it can be said that the station is in relative motion to the train, but the force is acting upon the train, and it is the train that is accelerating absolutely. Newton tried to establish an absolute frame of reference for the universe defined in relation to its center of gravity. (not necessarily identical with the sun) Absolute spatial movement and position could then be measured in relation to that point.

But is geometry an empirical or ideal activity? For Cassirer, the most radical removal of geometry from experience had already occurred with Euclid, which was already based on figures that are removed from all possibility of experiment. Not only the idealizations of point, line, and plane, but the idea of similar triangles, whose differences are considered inconsequential or fortuitous, and that become identified as "the same" mark an immense step away form ordinary perception.

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space / place

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"Give place, let the prisoner by; give place." -- the first English use of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionnary

In the Physics, esp. book IV, Aristotle proposes a theory of place (topos) that rejects Plato's theory of space. The topos is a place of belonging. It is distinct from the body, which is defined by length, width, and depth. Yet there is a definite relationship of community or conflict between the nature of bodies and the nature of places: every physical element seeks "its" place, the place that belongs and corresponds to it, and it flees from any other opposed to it. For Aristotle "the motions of simple bodies (fire, earth, and so forth) show not only that place is something but that place has some kind of functional significance (potentia also force)" (cf. posture) although this power is not definable (like the forces of attraction and repulsion in modern physics)

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space

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According to Sun Ra "Space is the place".

"The fascination which space seems to hold for philosophy is only equalled by the fascination which the idea of system holds for architects." (Christian Girard, Architecture et Concepts Nomades, p.72)

(cf. Roland Barthes' distinction between l'esprit de syst me and l'esprit syst matique .)

In this document, space is no longer considered unitary, as having a single essence, concept, or function. This is perhaps an indication of an outlook that is suspicious of the repressive ambition of a universal space which suppresses multiplicities, catastrophes, and incommensurabilities. One way to break with strategy is to fragment space. A typological approach to space in architecture, and a sensitivity to metaphor as crucial to theorization, indicate a move away from a singular concept of either space or theory.

The following taxonomy of spaces is a mixture of disciplinary divisions (art history, philosophy, etc.), technological divisions (writing, Cyberspace), territorial divisions (urban space), and subjective divisions (psycho-sexual, personal).

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social space

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"The paranoid person takes up too much social space" (Donna Haraway)

In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre reclaims space as a primarily social problematic. For Lefebvre, the proliferation of this and/or that space, eg. literary space, ideological space, the space of the dream etc. is a general consequence of of the concept of mental space (p.3) through the epistemologico-philosophical thinking of western Logos (in both science and philosophy). (see philosophical space ) Lefebvre unmasks this mode of thought as a powerful ideological tendency, expressing the dominant ideas of the dominant class, through the concept of abstract space.

The very proliferation of descriptions and sectionings of space is for Lefebvre an example of the endless division of labor within present-day society. Lefebvre sees spatial practice as the projection onto a (spatial) field of all aspects, elements and moments of social practice. (p.8) If he uses terms of language or contemporary theory, he is also at pains to recontextualize them as produced by a social subject. For example, he believes that a coded language (of space) may be said to have existed on the practical basis of a specific relationship between town, country and political territory, a language based on classical perspective and Euclidean space, and that that system collapsed in the twentieth century. But, he adds, if spatial codes have existed, each characterizing a particular spatial/social practice, and if these codifications have been produced along with the space corresponding to them, then the job of theory is to elucidate their rise, their role, and their demise. (p.17)

The task is thus a dialectical one, and both things in space and discourse on space do no more than supply clues to this productive process which subsumes signifying processes without being reducible to them. (p. 37) (see also representation)

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teleology

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In the Timaeus, Plato pictured the natural world as the product of a divine craftsman who looked to the world of eternal being for his model of the good and then created a natural order that was as good as it possibly could be. ("Teleology", by James C. Lennox, in Keller and Lloyd, eds. Keywords in Evolutionary Biology ) This model is the origin of what is sometimes referred to as "external teleology." The "externality" is twofold: the agent whose goal is being acheived is external to the object, and the value is the agent's value, not the object's. (This is much closer to the idea of the machine) 

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