Unravelling the Obviousness of Space
Paul Downes, author of The Primordial Dance: Diametric and Concentric Spaces in the Unconscious World
The obviousness of space must be unravelled. A taken for granted conception of space in Western thought treats it as an empty, nonentity, as part of a Cartesian prejudice. Space is more than mere interval, more than mere rooting in place.
Space offers a bridge to overcome the Cartesian split between the material and symbolic, between body and mind, as a precondition for both. The specific spaces explored in The Primordial Dance, concentric and diametric spaces, are treated as not merely static structures but also as processes of vitality for change in experience and understanding.
Very basic aspects of experience (connection/separation, symmetry, relative openness/closure) are meaningful in spatial terms and cluster into contrasts between concentric and diametric spaces of relation. A concentric relation assumes connection between its parts, whereas diametric opposition assumes separation. Diametric spatial mirror image symmetry inversions include good/bad, powerful/powerless, active/passive, love/hate, sacred/profane, us/them, normal/other, win/lose, success/failure, and above/below hierarchy. Diametric opposition, as the basic schema for Western logic, is strongly associated with a Western priority for diametric over concentric spaces.
This interplay as a tension and dance between concentric and diametric spaces is examined as not simply a cross-cultural phenomenon across a wide range of domains of experience and understanding. It is a tension and dance with implications for shifting fundamental concepts in major thinkers in continental philosophy (Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida) and in depth psychology (Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Carol Gilligan & R.D Laing). The Primordial Dance immerses itself in an interrogation of these seven seminal thinkers’ foundational ideas, mediated also through a reinterpretation of spatial structures initially excavated in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology. This inquiry is not with a view to reheating structuralism but rather to carving open the contours of a spatial phenomenology, a phenomenology not simply of space but through space.
Concentric and diametric space lurks as a silent, surreptitious force underpinning foundational concepts of Heidegger’s Being and Time, namely, Angst, Care, Temporal Transcendence, Authenticity, Inauthenticity, Dwelling and Encountering. They are seeped into Kant’s antinomy between freedom and causality, and Derrida’s pervasive concepts of the trace, erasure, différance and archive. The panoply of Freud’s accounts of repression, ambivalence, obsessional neurosis, separation anxiety, life and death drives are all framed within a whisper structure of diametric and concentric spaces. Jung’s treatment of the mandala structure as the central unifying archetype of the collective unconscious is again a concentric spatial framework interacting with diametric spatial understandings, as are his concepts of introversion, extraversion, anima, animus and projection, as part of a wider search for meaning prior to myth. Gilligan’s ethic of care and logic of justice are framed in concentric and diametric spatial terms of assumptions of connection and separation, as are her phenomenological accounts of adolescent experience. Laing’s identification of core patterns of experience in psychosis all bear the burden of a concentric and diametric spatial understanding. Space is itself a system, a system of meaningful relations through the contrasts between diametric and concentric spaces. This spatial discourse does not simply describe but goes further to reconfigure the basic assumptions and understandings offered by all of these key thinkers pertaining to experience, truth claims and understanding.
