Page 180 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 167

At the beginning of this chapter, we cited Paul Ricoeur’s parallels between tempo-
rality and spatiality, where spatial localization within the dialectic of lived, geomet-
rical and inhabited space corresponded to temporal dating within the similar dialectic
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of lived, cosmic and historical time. Our informants’ media practices offered many
examples of these dialectics, as they used media to locate themselves in the world and
simultaneously to interpret the particular moment of the present, in relation to a past
somewhere else and a possible future where elements from different places could be
combined and inhabited in new ways.
In the spatial dimension, this is often depicted as a dialectical process between
space, on the one hand, and place on the other, where space is conceptualized as
abstract geometric coordinates in constant tension with concrete, meaningful local-
ities. Doreen Massey criticizes this ‘persistent counterposition of space and place’, as
the abstract vs. the concrete, and frequently linked to ‘a parallel counterposition
between global and local’. ‘The couplets local/global and place/space do not map on
to that of concrete/abstract.’ 52 Ricoeur’s model avoids this fallacy by specifying
different levels of spatiality, parallel to the corresponding levels of temporality. It is
important to avoid projecting the dialectics of abstract structure and concrete agency
onto the interplay between space and time in general. Instead, as we have shown, a
dialectics of abstract, subjective and intersubjective develops within each of these
dimensions.
Massey recognizes space, first, as ‘the product of interrelations’, from the global
to the minute as always ‘constituted through interactions’; second, as the sphere of
‘multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality’ where ‘distinct trajectories
coexist’ and thus of ‘coexisting heterogeneity’; and, third, ‘as always under construc-
tion’, i.e. as ‘a simultaneity of stories-so-far’. For Massey, space ‘is no more than the
sum of our relations and interconnections, and the lack of them; it too is utterly
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“concrete”’. This is an excellent corrective to the one-sided negative view of space
as an abstract and restricting structure. If time is a dimension of change, it is indeed
important to understand that space is a dimension of coexisting multiplicities.
However, it is difficult to ascribe any particular characteristics to either dimension
in splendid isolation. The simultaneous multiple trajectories Massey speaks of can
hardly exist without their simultaneous combination, since trajectories presuppose
their mutual intersection. It serves little purpose to project any critical burden or
emancipatory hopes onto any of these basic dimensions as such, since one can never
exist without the other, and each should rather be understood to have a wide range
of aspects, from the abstract to the concrete, as well as from the restricting to the
liberating. If the thinkers who may be called the ‘temporalists’ tend to overestimate
the revolutionary role of time and reduce space to a confining geometric grid, then
the opposite ‘spatialist’ position makes an equally problematic reverse projection of
utopian values onto space. Here again, Ricoeur’s analysis avoids reducing the rich
complexity and ambiguity of both time and space, pointing instead to different ways
each of them may be used and understood, and how they are interlaced in social
practice.

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