ABSTRACT
How have we arrived at such an abstract and rarified concept to describe the world in which we live? My contention is that it results from the operation of what I have called the logic of inversion. I have already introduced this logic in Chapter 5 (p. 68). In a nutshell, inversion turns the pathways along which life is lived into boundaries within which it is enclosed. Life, according to this logic, is reduced to an internal property of things that occupy the world but do not, strictly speaking, inhabit it. A world that is occupied but not inhabited, that is filled with existing things rather than woven from the strands of their cominginto-being, is a world of space. In what follows I shall show how the logic of inversion transforms our understanding, first, of place, second, of movement, and third, of knowledge. Emplacement becomes enclosure, travelling becomes transport, and ways of knowing become transmitted culture. Putting all these together, we are led to that peculiarly modular conception of being that is such a striking feature of modernity, and of which the concept of space is the logical corollary.
