Practice, communication and space : a reflection on the materiality of social structures

Abstract

The general issue of relations between sociality and spatiality, until recently profoundly ignored outside \nspatial studies, has become a focus of great theoretical attention in a number of disciplines – what has been \ncalled, remarkably, the “spatial turn” in social and cultural theory. The thesis wishes to address a central \nproblem in that debate: the connection of practice and space. It does so emphasising a dimension that has not \nbeen previously explored to a significant degree: the conditions of sociation of practice, or a material account \nof how action becomes social action and practice social practice. In other words, it investigates the place of \nspace in semantically mediated interactions that constitute the knots in (spatialised) networks of sociation – or \ncommunication. The thesis explores the spatiality of practice and communication as a problem worth of \ntheoretical attention, suggesting that precisely the absence of this dimension has led theory to fail to spot the \nspatial traces of relations between our daily acts – traces active in the very moment of sociation of practice, \nindeed constitutive of the very possibility of any sociation; traces produced and performed through the \ninterpenetration of communication and space. The question the thesis addresses is the possibility of space not \njust as contingent location but also in itself encapsulating an essential constituent of the communicative \ncondition of the social. \nThe aim of this thesis is to focus on this theoretical deficit in a number of ways. First, existing theories of \nsociety and space relations as found in social theory, architecture and human geography are reviewed in order \nto assess how far they provide compelling answers to the problem of the communicative constitution of \npractice, and from this analysis, to set areas where further progress is needed. Second, an attempt is made to \nbuild an alternative frame to the sociality-spatiality relation as a relation between practice, communication \nand space, drawing on a number of diverse sources, mainly the theory of self-referentiality of Niklas \nLuhmann, the theory of communicative action of Jürgen Habermas, the post-modern questioning of notions \nlike “meaning” and “structure,” and new approaches in human geography and architecture. Thirdly, the \nimplications of this unconventional approach to the spatiality of the social world are discussed, and a concept, \nthe duality of meaning is proposed as a means to address the multiple relations between space and social \npractice. Fourth, the thesis suggests the possibility that the spatial emergence of practice as a communicative \nprocess requires, in order to come into being, some structuring of the space in which it occurs – a mutual, \nreferential structuration beyond the contingency of practice and space. \nDeveloping the idea of space as referential to communication, the thesis shows how space becomes the \nunconscious but referential substrate which provides a certain form of available organisation to the semantic \nfield where communication networks are performed, and social structures constantly emerge and fade away in \nconnections of linguistic acts and spaces. It suggests that a new and active role for space may be identified in \nthe sociality-spatiality relation: a “semanticised space” as a key dimension of (1) the “communicability of \npractice,” i.e. the informational connections that mediate the passage from the individual act into the \nsocialised act that takes part in unfolding social events; and (2) the very possibility of ontological relatedness, seeing space as a dimension of the “strings of reference” that produce the sense of “world-relationality” or \nstructure, inform socialities of possibilities of acts, and constitute the very possibility of actualisation of acts \nthrough the referentiality of practice, communication and space. Disclosing a “material referentiality” at the \nheart of practice, as the crisscrossing of communication, language, and space, it finally suggests the \npossibility of space as a counterpart to the elusiveness of forms of communication and relationality in the \nsocial world, such as those semiotic fluxes based on spoken and written language, and electronic and visual \nmedia. In building such a conceptual scheme, the thesis lays down the aims of a “referential approach” to the \nmateriality of the social world: clarifying space itself in the communicability of practice; clarifying its role for \nsocialities by showing a referential space as a means to the sociation of acts; and clarifying socialities \nthemselves by showing how profoundly and pervasively they rely on the referentiality of space.

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