On the Philosophy of Space and Time
I am a very judgmental person in character, but there’s few things I loathe more than vapid quotes on Social Media. Ranking in the vertiginous heights of a hateful and bilious list: “The world is a book and those who do not travel only read one page.” These words are originally attributed to Saint Augustine of Hippo, but have long since been emptied out, sucked dry and hurled inflationarily across virtual walls and newsfeeds; and while they might not say much about travelling in our age, they do reveal a lot about our society and the way we think about the world — essentially, this means that space has become an epistemological problem.
A Tug of Time and Space
While the philosophy of space and time has been of great interest since, well, the beginning of time, space used to stand in the shadow of time for long, being regarded as a kind of physical container in which the metaphysical battles of philosophy and time are being fought out. Since the rise of modern physics, space and time in the discursive continuum have been deeply intertwined if not tangled, you can’t think one without the other. But as an epistemological or even ontological category, space has been overlooked for years — until Michel Foucault, the French philosopher interested in power relations and men in leather, declared in a lecture in the 1960s, after decades of almost perverse obsession with history and chronometry: “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space”.[1]
The Rise of Spatiality
This new approach by Michel Foucault or French sociologist Henri Lefebvre was later ingrained by human geographer and theorist Edward Soja in the concept of a “spatial turn”, and what it proposes is this: that space is made; that it’s not a matter of mere materialism, but rather a cultural construct. Much like the linguistic turn only a hot while prior, this shift of paradigm argues that knowledge is firmly tied to our conception of it: Language or maps, as a form of written space, are not conceived as means to represent reality anymore, but rather as tools that actively produce reality — time might be of the essence; space is not. To understand space then, we must first and foremost understand how we talk about it. No one said poststructuralism was a good time for lovers of hard facts.
Foucault on Instagram, or: The Epistemological Space
Foucault would have been fascinated with social media: Not only is the internet, much like his example of a mirror, maybe the closest to a realization of a heterotopia imaginable — a space that is “other”, a placeless place but still locatable — , it is also a space itself obsessed with space. On various social media platforms (even this being a spatial term), the shift from time to space has taken place (another spatial reference) in depth: Timelines there might run linear or circular, there’s boomerangs and throwbacks and reposts and the problem of non-chronometry opens up new dimensions (see, we think topologically!). Maybe for a society constantly concerned about individuality, time has become too communist a concept; it runs equally for everyone. It’s a given, not a conquest. Space, on the other hand, can be conquered: By geotagging our every move and virtually sticking little flags on each ground we cover, we claim parts of the makeup of the world — and the knowledge that’s been assigned to it.
With globalization, frontiers have been loosened in the Western world, shaking up traditional notions of national identity and substituting them with new ideas — not to say ideologies — of crossing geographical and imaginative borders: Travelling has turned into a lifestyle, if not even a cult or a new form of religion. Instagrammers and travel blogs affirm the beliefs of their followers, starven for spiritual guidelines that are as easy to follow as the striated roads of Tripadvisor: That open-mindedness is to be found in open spaces and broadening your mind only possible when abroad, and while it is neither a new idea nor entirely wrong (all the same not being entirely correct either), it proves above all this: We think in spatial concepts. We construct the world, but also embed ourselves in it: Space has become not only an epistemological tool, but also an outlet for an ontological need and apps like Instagram are proving this every day.
Walking Back on Earth: Geophilosophy, Nietzsche and a Wandering Mind
The hashtag #Wanderlust ranks amongst the most popular hashtags on Instagram. And I would argue: We can trace it back to Friedrich Nietzsche. Yes, the philosopher with the frail body and the strong moustache, the thinker with a mind of dynamite that exploded fatally some time around the day he flung his arms around a horse on the street and broke down sobbing, the prophet who despised herd mentality and would have cried in horror at the prostitution in social media and its tragically conformist cultivation of collective individuality, that man has been a wanderer himself.
But the connection between walking and thinking bears a far longer tradition: The Sophists, wise men in Athens holding philosophical ground before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, have wandered. Kant and Kierkegaard walked and strolled, Rousseau wrote in the Confessions that his mind “only works with [his] legs”[2] — which, among other symptoms, led some experts recently to diagnose him with ADHD — and it can be assumed that even today a lot of professors are pacing up and down the lecture hall as they’re trying to move the minds of their students. The belief that for opinions to be mobile and flexible, they body had to be, too, is certainly not a new one.[3]
Nietzsche though was a different kind of wanderer: Not only walking for the sake of walking, that is the movement of the legs, but highly concerned with the climate of his environment, his feet and thought were much more tied to the space they were perambulating; in works like Ecce Homo the German philologist and philosopher keeps talking about fresh air and clear thoughts, soaring up his writings into the heights of the Swiss mountains[4] — and thus creating a philosophy firmly grounded in the earth. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari later coined the term “geophilosophy” [5], seeing the evolution of philosophy as a process “marked by detours and contingency”[6] and credited Nietzsche as the “inventor”[7] of this way of thought: A kind of neo-materialism, geophilosophy is best, albeit not sufficiently described as a thinking deeply connected to geographical space. Not taking ideas for abstract or absolute entities, but rather relative truths, Nietzsche was one of the first to ask: What is the typical German way to philosophize? What is the French way, what the Italian? Why did Western philosophy originate on Greek grounds? Fernand Braudel later inquired why capitalism emerged in England. And Albert Camus deemed nihilistic Nazism in war torn 20th century a phenomenon of the cold spheres of northern Europe, opposing them to a Mediterranean ideal of midday and measure. So what does Instagram have to do with all of this?
Why Are We So Obsessed With Places on Social Media?
Location tags or topography-related hashtags on social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook give insight into the way people use space. But while most analysts ask: How can we use this data to tailor ads and gain economic profit?, philosophers should pose another question: Why are we using space in the way we do in the first place? Because it’s not only a practical path to connect with people that makes us map out our entire lives — it is a deeply ontological undertaking. In a highly privileged Western society that allows us to choose our domiciles or workplace relatively freely, we have come to define ourselves by the spaces we visit or inhabit: Space has become an existential choice.
Globalization and new technologies have been democratizing landscapes and urban spaces. But while geography has lost is limiting character, connecting people across the whole world instead of separating them from each other, it has also kindled a desire to reconnect with the earth in a more liberated way: Now that we don’t have to depend on space anymore — at least not in the strict sense, working in digital fields instead of on agricultural grounds and thinking more globally than locally — ,we are driven back to it in a more existential search for identity.
Bios are particularly interesting indicators on this ontology: How do people describe themselves within a 150-character-limit? You’ll come to notice: Not by age (representing time). Many of them don’t even state their profession. No, what most people find to be the first thing that places them as a human being on the social map is location; and they shape their idea of themselves by a status saying “Munich/Berlin”, “University of Alberta”, “SE/DE/FR/US”, “Based in Paris”, “Sometimes in Reus” (all real examples from my follower list), or simply little flags: Your life in an emoji. Other people might just describe themselves as “travel lovers”, but what they’re ontologically saying is: “I like to identify myself with the plurality of spaces”.
While on platforms primarily focused on networking without borders, like Twitter or LinkedIn, the dream sold is that space doesn’t matter anymore, on pages mainly used for ego-advertising and cultivating a sense of self, it’s as if in a way it’s all that matters — it’s matter and idea at the same time. Spatiality is, more than history and more than ever, an epistemological and ontological tool with which we shape the world. Whatever the outcome, through social media it becomes more and more apparent that we’re affirming the topographical turn: We organize our lives less in timelines and more in maps.
Temper(ature): A Last Question of Climate and Change
Last but not least, rising temperatures and sea levels force us to take a look at changing topographies today and every day: Climate change, once the harmlessly fascinating subject of science-fiction novels, has mushroomed into a near and somewhat inevitable reality, confronting us with nature as a system that is both subject and object — Montaigne, Herder and other thinkers who promoted a climatological way of thinking that assigns different personalities to people depending on their country of origin, aligning temperature with temper, thought mainly about the impact of nature on man; since the proclaimed era of the Anthropocene, a term Dutch scientiest Paul Crutzen proposed in 2000 for our geological epoch marked by industrialization and man-made technology, it’s become apparent than man also has a huge impact on nature.
The problem is, of course, linked to economy: As we consume nature and throw up its not so infinite resources, space under capitalism has spiraled from an ontological category into an epistemological subject into a status symbol — which resulted into our forms of social media where we collect “experiences” like squirrels collect nuts in the winter and pretend we’ve found an immaterialist form of consumerism: except that plane tickets and train fares, hotel rooms and parking spaces, hiking trails and sightseeing platforms are neither idealistic nor ideal — they are capitalism with a friendly face on it.
Maybe that’s what all this is: A deep longing for understanding what the fuck is going on. Even though most people on Instagram don’t know what it means to grasp the world phenomenologically or semiotically, they could probably identify with German philosopher Hans Blumenberg who wrote a book about the legibility of the world[8], asking not so much what we can know — but what it was that we wanted to know. We want to know, but all we do is copy-paste Augustine of Hippo and marvel at a few acres of newly acquired facts. “The world is a book and those who do not travel only read one page.” Instead of simply buying books and showing off our shelves, maybe we should be on the same page for a change and just start reading.
References:
[1] Michel Foucault, Des espaces autres, Conference at the Cercle d’études architecturales in Paris, 14 March 1967.
[2] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, 1782.
[3] Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust. A History of Walking, 2000.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1908.
[5] Gilles Deleuze; Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 1980.
[6] Keith Woodward, Geophilosophy — The International Encyclopedia of Geography, 2017.
[7] Arun Saldanha, Space After Deleuze, 2017.
[8] Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, 1981.
essay written for and first published in Carpe Noctem, Issue No 1
Photo credits: USGS (unsplash) with Unsplash license
