Spatiality

In current academic parlance, particularly in the humanities and cultural studies, spatiality is an increasingly used but ill-defined foundational term. Spatiality can be defined as any property relating to or occupying space. The flexibility of the concept, as both a noun and an adjective, can be seen in its various uses—to refer to a quality of material space, to call on the power of spatial metaphors, and (at times) to imply that material space and spatial metaphors increasingly are the same. The term spatiality, then, can refer to actual material space and jurisdiction, virtual space, assumptions about the nature of space, and the ways in which everyday experiences of space undermine these same assumptions. The term refers to material spaces and spatial metaphors, often at the same time. Therefore, spatiality, like globalization or hegemony, is an analytical term increasingly made to bear the weight of a substantive term such as space itself. Of particular importance is the rise of the term's popularity at the very moment that networked information technologies, such as the Web and other new media (e.g., virtual reality), give rise to a belief in a parallel or virtual space produced by and dependent on these technologies and the experiences of their users. Authors writing about these technologies have claimed that electronic networks increasingly serve as the organizing concept for the spaces of everyday life.

Applied to networks and their ability to link people globally, spatiality connotes the materiality of space in terms of virtual networks. For example, cyberspace has been argued to possess a quality of spatiality by virtue of its ability to convey to users experiences of immersion and interaction. When used to imply quality, spatiality conveys a sense of its own agency or even jurisdiction, an agency that operates to place an individual within a metaphorical space. The term, therefore, can also act as a metonymic bridge between metaphor and personal experience. Metaphors themselves are inherently spatial forms of written and verbal intellection. Spatiality, used metaphorically to suggest the spatial nature of electronic networks, also implies a spatial quantity that works to support claims that the virtual spaces such networks support are not much different from the material spaces of embodied everyday life.

In its meanings as both a quality of space and yet also of space itself, the term, with its allegorical ability to blur material and linguistic practices, may lead to an indistinction or blurring of meanings among metaphors of space, actual spaces, and their different but increasingly interpenetrating jurisdictions unless the writer or speaker is careful to note the specific contexts of use (i.e., the lived, the material, and the conceptual or any combination of these three) each time the term is employed. Although space and experience rely on one another for their meanings, an underconsidered use of the term spatiality introduces the potential to blur meaningful distinctions between the two. For example, spatiality, when used to promote the materiality of virtual space, relies on a widespread understanding that experiences of virtual space are real even though such experiences must necessarily rely on spatial metaphors to assist users in orienting themselves within networks. As in the case with any neologism, the wide array of assumed but potentially conflicting definitions that underlie the contemporary use of the term may lead to an ironic outcome where readers are at a loss to understand what is being argued or the limits to the argument.

...