Social Space

The past few decades have seen a renewed interest in space as a concept for social theory. This “spatial turn” has occurred at a time when ever-denser flows of goods, capital, information, services, and people around the globe have led to what Karl Marx called the “annihilation of space by time” or, to put it more carefully, time-space compression. This thinking is in line with the dominant strand of sociological thinking throughout much of the twentieth century, which has seen the process of differentiation of modern society being inextricably linked to emancipation from spatial factors. In a nutshell, theorists such as Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim assumed that space would gradually lose in significance as abstract forms of social organization (Vergesellschaftung), such as monetarized exchange, become more pervasive.

Yet the resurgence of theorizing on space raises the question whether modernity, late modernity, or postmodernity is indeed characterized by a decoupling of space and time. It could be hypothesized that even time-space compression may not lead to a disappearance of space but to a regrouping of space-time orders. After all, space—very much like the much more theorized concept of time—is a crucial element of Vergesellschaftung.

Social science concepts of space have been influenced by and built upon mainly two distinct, ideal typical understandings derived from physics—absolutist and relativist (Albert Einstein). The absolute understanding of space is based on a Eucledian view and posits a dualism between space and social life and bodies. According to this view, space exists as a contextual background condition, independently of social action and human perceptions. Social action thus proceeds within an unmovable and fixed space. This sort of container is not thought to be part of social action. By contrast, a relative understanding views space as constituted by the structure of the relative positions of the bodies and objects to each other. Accordingly, spaces do not exist independently of social relations defined by the positions of actors, social action, and social goods such as status and power. Social relations flow into the production of spaces, their formation, and their institutionalization.