ABSTRACT
The present chapter is a conceptual reconnaissance designed to discuss some non-reductive vocabularies of social theory of space and their usefulness for social theory of culture. I first briefly discuss ‘space’ as a sociological category, especially how it had originally been positioned in the seminal works of Henri Lefebvre and Pierre Bourdieu. Then I ask what it would take to reinscribe it systematically in the theory of ‘field of cultural production’. That is to say, I ask how can sociologists understand space as a factor in meaning-making. Haunted at once by the specters of essentialism and materialism, the relation between space and culture may have come across as a dangerous liaison of sorts. This risk is avoidable, though. One way to avoid it is to more resolutely bring phenomenological thinking back into sociological analysis. After several theoretical considerations, I exemplify my conception with a discussion of the notion of the music scene. Reducible neither to materialities of the built environment nor to attributive conceptions of discursive signification, scenes both implicate and explicate the tripartite conception of spatiality in meaning making. First, as a mode of cultural production and play, the scene can be viewed as what British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott defined as ‘third area’ or ‘space of cultural experience’. Second, as a mode of cultural contestation and social alterity, scenes evince characteristics of what Michel Foucault called ‘heterotopia’. Third, scenes are also co-produced by what I would provisionally designate as ‘Raumgeist’ – an experiential environment that helps specify and disambiguate a given space (Raum), just like certain collective feelings – and corresponding collective representations – help define a given historical period as its Zeitgeist. I thereby attempt to create a multifaceted conceptual ecology in which one can reconsider the spatiality of meaning.
