ABSTRACT
Postmodernist preoccupations with language and socio-historically constructed truths invite a vital plurality of paradigms but rest ultimately on an unsatisfactory relativism. Its emphasis on time has obscured a scrutiny of space. A spatial turn in the social sciences has at least brought the problematising of space to the fore, though it has tended to reduce space to place. There are vast continents of space still to be discovered, also going beyond a simple postmodern historicising of space. It is not a matter of retreating into the subject-object dualism, deconstructed in postmodernist thought. Rather there is a need to interrogate the spatial background conditions of relation, prior to language, that underpin the ‘distanciation’ between subject and object observed by Ricoeur (1978). In the digital age, the picture gains a primacy over language. This invites further interrogation of space not only for communication, but also for our existence and modes of being developed in education. Space is a precondition for language; language is not a precondition for space (Downes, 2016). Space is itself a system, a system of meaningful relations through the contrasts between different spaces, spaces of difference, such as cross-cultural concentric and diametric spaces (Downes, 2012, 2013). Space cannot be eliminated from language as a system of meaningful relations (Downes, 2016). There is a need to interrogate primordial spatial discourses prior to language to move beyond postmodernity. Seeds of such a spatial interrogation include early Foucault’s (1972) concern with a fundamental structure of exclusion, and amplification of Derrida’s quest for a psychoanalytic graphology still to come (Downes, 2012, 2013). Treating space as a fundamental precondition for experience and for truth claims, as a horizon if not a ground, invites search for dynamic spatial movements underpinning fundamental assumptions—movements that do not rely on static centres. Space offers a bridge to overcome the Cartesian split between the material and symbolic, between body and mind, as a precondition for both. It offers a potential directional unity for understanding, without a retreat into simple metanarratives of truth as totality. The issue of space is not of uncovering a ‘substance’ but rather sets of dynamic relationships. Spatial relations are prior to the sensory/nonsensory opposition underlying Western metaphysics. Space relates fundamentally to the presensory, as a precondition for the sensory. Space is not simply as an object for the sensory. Without the medium of space, sound cannot be heard; without space to move through, the resistance of touch cannot be experienced. Spatial assumptions underpin a panorama of life systems, including intrapsychic, interpersonal, social, macrosystemic, linguistic and educational systems. What kinds of spatial systems of relation are to be developed in education systems for experiences of the future ? Space is not simply pregiven but is malleable to some degree. The constraints and possibilities of space for experience and education require interrogation in a spatial-phenomenology to come, one that is a phenomenology not simply of space but through space.
