Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3

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Geocriticism at the Crossroads: An Overview / Mariya Shymchyshyn

<1> In the article I will outline some of the methodological and theoretical development in late twentieth-century criticism that led to the spatial turn in the humanities. In particular, I will concentrate my attention on the concepts of space in the works of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, and I will pursue how they influenced literary theory, causing the emergence of "geocriticism" (e.g., in the work of Robert Tally, Bertrand Westphal, Eric Prieto) or, using another term, "literary geography" (e.g., in Franco Moretti). I will argue that the postmodern condition generated an alertness to space rather than time in different fields of scholarship, as historicism has undergone decline under postmodernism. My conclusion is that incorporating geographical thought into a variety of domains of research offers a better understanding of human experience, social relations, and cultural production. Even though the concept of space as well as a geographical framework in general have been revised and injected into recent theoretical inquiries, they have not been fully applied to literary criticism. We can witness the beginning of the process of formation of a coherent spatial paradigm within literary theory.

<2> Over the last few decades the spatial turn has become one of the main focuses in literary theory and cultural studies, enabling (re)conceptualizations of ways of thinking about space and place. The discourse of postmodernism disclosed a break from languages, which emphasized history, and concentrated its attention on real and fictional milieu. Neil Smith in the introduction to Henri Lefebvre's The Urban Revolution observes that "whereas space came alive in early-twentieth-century art, physics, and mathematics, in social theory and philosophy it was a quite different story. Space there was more often synonymous with rigidity, immobility, stasis; space itself had become a blind field." [1] After the 1960s, space has begun to reassert itself in critical theory not only as a subject of symbolic readings or as an empty or neutral container of Euclidian geometry, but as a fluid, heterogenic and composite world, as a palimpsest (Gerard Genette), as a hyperspace that produces derivative spaces, as a referent for an experience of the real, as a product of speech, and as a construct of social forces and power discourses. As Russell West-Pavlov put it, "Far from being a neutral void in which objects are placed and events happen, space/ing becomes a medium with its own consistency and, above all, its own productive agency." [2] In his now famous 1967 speech "Of Other Spaces," Foucault explained that "The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciations of the world. […] The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtapositions, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein." [3] Space and geography as major theoretical orientations bring new perspectives and open new horizons in the humanities.

<3> The spatial turn in philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, and literary theory correlated with the redefinition of cultural geography's agenda. During 1980s and 1990s new cultural geographers brought the topics of sensibility and political interests to their studies. Linda McDowell observes: "what is published and taught under the rubric of 'cultural geography' changes in response to the political and economic climate of the times and the structures of disciplinary power." [4] The epistemological turn of the 1990s stressed understanding culture through space and as space. Culture is not perceived only as tradition handed down from generation to generation, a point that connects it with time and history, but as "a realm, medium, level, or zone." Space is relevant to the production of cultural phenomena and defines the ways they are produced. As Barney Warf and Santa Arians write in their introduction to The Spatial Turn: "Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is crucial to knowing how and why they happen." [5] The new versions of culture that include everything or anything gave way to the intellectual traffic between philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, literary theories, and geography.

<4> The exchange of ideas between scholars of geography and representatives of others sciences gave way to broad, non-stereotyped interpretations of space. For example, geographers like Derek Gregory, Doreen Massey, Steve Pile, and Edward Soja adapted theoretical ideas developed by Lefebvre, de Certeau, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari. Productive connections between geography and literary postmodernism have been made in by these spatial theorists. The postmodernist suspicion of total explanations, rejection of monopolies of truth, and accent on difference, heterogeneity, and particularity contribute significantly to postmodern cultural geography. At the same time literary scholars Westphal, Tally, and Moretti drew upon the work of these new cultural geographers in their own criticism and theory. Thus, for instance, Moretti states that "geography is not an inert container, is not a box, where cultural history 'happens', but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth." [6] The geographical paradigm becomes more and more a constitutive part of literary scholarship. Although sporadic attention to space or, it is better to say, place has always been present in philosophical and fictional writings, the emergence of geocriticism in the early 1990s reaccentuated literary discussions.

<5> The history of perception of space and place in different historical periods as well as in different cultures shows fundamental changes in the ways people have imagined the world. In the Renaissance or early modern period several crucial shifts took place and had lasting consequences. Among them was the development of linear perspective, "which not only enabled more 'accurate' pictorial representations in the visual arts but also occasioned a wholesale re-imagining of space and of human spatial relations. This is a crucial moment in the history of spaces." [7] According to the American scholar Leonard Goldstein, the emergence of linear perspective between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries located space in three key aspects: (1) space is continuous, isotropic, and homogeneous; (2) space is quantifiable; (3) space is perceived from the point of view of a single, central observer. The shift from the two-dimensional artistic expression of the middle ages and the geometric three-dimensional drawings of the Italian Renaissance to the linear perspective of pictorial art of early capitalism can be explained by the emergence of new forms of private property and commodity production. "Space could now be measured, divided, quantified, bought and sold, and above all controlled by a particular individual who, in theory, could be the sovereign ruler of all he surveyed." [8] Linear perspective, created in the modern period by Filippo Brunelleschi, reflected the new ways of seeing and enabled the development of a new image of the individual, who became the locus and source of meaning. Tally summarizes: "But the new point of view, which includes linear perspective and mechanism as its method of investigation, is superior [to the earlier iconographic mode] since it gives people a greater control over the environment, both physical and social, than previous interpretations of the world." [9]

<6> In the philosophical discourse from Heraclitus to Hegel and Marx the illusion of a transparent, pure and neutral space permeated the Western culture.The dynamics of understanding of space started with it being created by God (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) or the Absolute (Schelling, Fichte, Hegel) and later, according to Lefebvre, it "appeared as a mere degradation of 'being' as it unfolded in a temporal continuum." [10] The geometric format of Euclidean space was interpreted by philosophical thought as absolute and from this it follows that space was used as a space of reference. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were developed many ideas about space. Thus Descartes believed that space cannot be separated from bodies as bodies are part of space. Newton viewed space as an absolute, independent, infinite, three-dimensional container into which God placed the material universe. Leibniz developed the notion of space as the relation between bodies similar to distance as a relation between two points. Spinoza held the idea that space is God. Kant argued that the world is a subjective mental construction because it is perceived through the human reason. "Space is not something objective and real, nor is it a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; it is, rather, subjective and ideal; it issues from the nature of mind in accordance with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for co-ordinating everything sensed externally." [11] The philosophers, in their capacity of epistemologists, envisaged spaces for the classification of knowledge.

<7> In the nineteenth century space was mostly understood as the location for great historical events. Therefore temporality and history assumed a primary importance whereas space was viewed as static and empty. The view of space as a "container of things" diminished the importance of spatiality. The vista of a philosopher or a writer was directed to the things situated in space or to the individual consciousness perceiving them. The notion of historical progression, correlative with industrial and scientific revolutions, gave priority to the concept of time. Time was linearized while space was marginalized and conceived as given and static.

<8> The radical metamorphoses caused by modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth transformed the idea of space. Feelings of disorientation and disintegration started to characterize the individual consciousness. A break of the linear narrative in fiction and the linear perspective in a pictorial art correlated with a fragmented perception of space. Although issues of temporality were privileged in the critical works about modernism it does not mean that spatiality did not matter for modernist aesthetics. In his novel The Soul of London (1905), Ford Maddox Ford wrote that "we live in spacious times." Neglecting space in favor of time is a practice that David Harvey explains in the following way: "Modernity is about the experience of progress through modernization, writings on that theme have tended to emphasize temporality, the process of becoming, rather than being in space and place." [12] In literary studies objective space was substituted for the subjective image of space. Therefore even today the theoretical problem is to uncover the mediations between them. It is necessarily to separate "a false consciousness of abstract space and an objective falseness of space itself," as Lefebvre has put it. [13] But despite this, spatial metaphors such as fragmentation, location, center, margin, movement, belonging, and (im)migration became dominant in modernist discourse. That is why today scholars start to think about the spatiality of modernism, for example, in Andrew Thacker's excellent study of the subject. [14]

<9> During the modernist period the new concept of space emerged in pictorial art. The experimental activity of avant-garde painters, which neither imitated objective reality, nor was bound up with subjective emotions and feelings, witnessed the disappearance of points of reference and as a result pointed to the crisis of a subject. Picasso's way of painting can serve as an example: "The entire surface of the canvas was used, but there was no horizon, no background, and the surface was simply divided between the surface of painted figures and the space that surrounded them." [15] Therefore space became at once homogeneous and broken; the sign became detached from what is designated. The notion of space is perfectly defined and "born as an already adult and mature consciousness of self." [16]

<10> The rise of structuralism and later poststructuralism marked a key phase in the turn to space instead of time in critical inquiries. For instance, Edward Soja regarded structuralism to be "one of the twentieth century's most important avenues for the reassertion of space in critical social theory." [17] French structuralists and poststructuralists (including Kristeva, Genette, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari) reversed "the tyranny of the diachronic perspective" (Genette) and acclaimed the "spatial turn" in human sciences. Their writings correlated with the comprehensive theory of space offered by Lefebvre, who viewed space as a void woven of the relationships between subjects, their actions, and their environment. Milieus are created by action, but at the same time they are modeling the human actors who have constructed them.

<11> It is worth mentioning that structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to space do not always coincide. West-Pavlov states: "Structuralism conceived of space in a manner similar to the ostensibly undifferentiated pre-cultural field which culture then configures, using meaning-making binary oppositions. Instead, the spatial paradigms of poststructuralism stress that space persists in a constant re-confuring of already extant configurations." [18] For poststructuralists there is no virginal space before configured space, while for certain structuralists (e.g., the early Kristeva) there is always a proto-space, a pre-existing milieu.

<12> Theorists like Fredric Jameson, along with Harvey, Tally and Soja, argue that the spatial turn in the humanities is a response to the postmodernist condition. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson, following Lefebvre and Foucault, has stated that "our daily life, our psychic experiences, our cultural languages, are dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time." [19] Postmodern spatiality produced by the processes of globalization is defined, in part, through collapsed spatial barriers. Poststructuralists' ideas about the social construction of knowledge, human dependence upon institutionalized power networks, and impersonal social structures have evoked interest in the social production of space. Displacement of the priority of individual experience, subjective consciousness, and attention to the discourses of power explain the emphasis on the concept of space over that of place. Moreover the spatial turn corresponds with the deep paradigmatic changes within the humanities that do not deal so much with the reproductive paradigm of meaning, do not ask what artefacts mean, but how they mean. In this context West-Pavlov argues: "A deeper truth is not sought behind the statement, the text, the artefact, or the image. Rather the point of intellectual enquiry is to ask how that statement, text, artifact, or image came to be, what made it possible." [20] As far as meaning is produced in a specific time and context space is crucial for understanding its production. "Meaning is thus a function of space in which it emerges. Truth and falsehood are replaced by space as the matrix of meaning. An artifact no longer has 'a' meaning, no longer unveils 'a' truth under the stern scrutiny of the scholar, but rather, participates in myriad relations and connections which permit it to be in such a way that it can subsequently be asked to reveal its truth." [21] The regime of spatial analysis is directed not towards the decoding of a hidden meaning of a work of art, but draws "attention to a complex of ambient connections which have simply been neglected until now." [22] Space gives rise to the artefacts and at the same time artefacts reconfigure space; they define each other reciprocally.

<13> The critical attention of postmodernists to the concept of space has been evoked to a large extent by World War II and the anticolonial movements of the postwar years, which led to the problematizing of the myth of the history as a single unified narrative and destruction of the Enlightenment metanarrative of progress. Processes of decolonization and neocolonialism, along with massive movements of populations (exiles, émigrés, refugees, and explorers), have caused awareness of geographical difference, of the distinctiveness of a given place and differences among places. Therefore the phenomenological perspective of space, which emphasizes the subjective experience of place, profoundly worked out by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Poulet, then later renovated by such philosophers as Edward Casey, Jeff Malpas, Tyler Burke, Hilary Putman, Donald Davidson and Francisco Varela, has given way to epistemological, environmental or ecocritical (Kenneth White), postcolonial (Aimè Cèsaire, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Edouard Glissant, Edward Said), feminist (bell hooks, Lucy Lippard, Doreen Massey, Linda McDowell) and Marxist (Lefebvre, Jameson, Harvey, Soja, Raymond Williams) ideas about space. Their rejection of the priority of individual experience, of the notion of totalizing space as an absolute and inhuman construction, and of spatial uniformity opened up discussions about the heterogeneous nature of space. "It is not, therefore, as though one had global (or conceived) space to one side and fragmented (or lived) space to the other - rather as one might have an intact glass here and a broken glass or mirror over there. For space 'is' whole and broken, global and fragmented, at one and the same time. Just as it is at once conceived, perceived and directly lived." [23] Lefebvre argued against the traditional optical format of space. The logic of visualization, dependence on the written word and the process of spectacularization, which corresponds to metaphoric and metonymic aspects, caused a vanishing of all impressions derived from taste, smell, touch, and hearing and left the field to line, colour and light. He criticized a purely visual passive space.

<14> Many of the ideas about space developed in the second half of the twentieth century (e.g., those of Jameson, Harvey, Soja, and Westphal), were formulated in dialogue the works of Lefebvre, who in The Production of Space proposed first of all to distinguish between mental space and social space and only then to reconnect them. For him "the concept of space is not in space. […] The content of the concept of space is not absolute space or space-in-itself; nor does the concept contain a space within itself. […] Rather, the concept of space denotes and connotes all possible spaces, whether abstract or 'real', mental or social. And in particular it has two aspects: representational spaces and representations of space." [24] There should not be any reduction of content to its formal container, reduction of time to space, reduction of objects to signs, reduction of "reality" to the semiophere, or reduction of social space to a purely mental space.

<15> Lefebvre interpreted space from different angles and worked out a broad typology of it. For him space can be a field of action and a basis of action, it can be actual (given) and potential (locus of possibilities), quantitative (measurable by means of units of measurement) and qualitative, a collection of materials and an ensemble of matèriel (tools). In writings about spatial architectonics Lefebvre proposed a capacious definition of space: "Space-my space-is not the context of which I constitute the 'textuality': instead, it is first of all my body, and then it is my body's counterpart or 'other', its mirror-image or shadow: it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other. Thus we are concerned, once again, with gaps and tensions, contacts and separations. Yet, through and beyond these various effects of meaning, space is actually experienced in its depths,as duplications, echoes and reverberations, redundancies and doublings-up which engender-and are engendered by the strangest of contrast: face and arse, eye and flesh, viscera and excrement, lips and teeth, orifices and phallus, clenched fists and opened hands-as also clothed versus naked, open versus closed, obscenity versus familiarity, and so on." [25] This profound notion of space as a locus of intersections, contacts, tensions, and relationships gives numerous possibilities to geocriticism. This particular understanding of milieu advocates a polysensuous approach to it, which includes the sounds, smells, and tastes of places.

<16> Lefebvre worked out three aspects of space: experienced space (physical space that can be measured), representations of space (space perceived by planners, etc., and drawn on maps, diagrams), representational space (imagined by writers and artists). In a broader sense this differentiation can be extrapolated to literary theory and can help to disclose how the representational spaces of fictional texts reflect, contest or endorse the geographical shaping of different topoi by various ideological representations of space.

<17> Lefebvre developed also the notion of "third space" as the relationship between body and material/object, which his follower, postmodern political geographer Soja defines as a space where "everything comes together […] subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history." [26] The idea of a thirdspace as a mixture of a lived, experienced space and a perceived space proposed by Lefebvre and later developed by Soja can be extrapolated for use in examining an imaginary space. Discourse of a body, which is produced by and is the production of space, can give us some notion of a thirdspace, which may signify a fictional space. A body is not an object or subject represented by fragmented images or words, but a body, which is "reflected and refracted in the changes that it wreaks in its 'milieu' or 'environment'-in other words, in its space." [27] A verbal, semantic, and semiological space can be enlarged by information from the body (smell, taste, sound). An interplay between verbal disembodiment and empirical re-embodiment helps to gain the meaning of lived experience and overcome spatialization in an abstract expanse.

<18> The spatial theory present in the philosophical oeuvre of Foucault, has become a paramount part of the recent "spatial turn" in literary and cultural studies. Whereas for Lefebvre space is a product of social relations and at the same time their producer, for Foucault space is power, as far as power is always located spatially. This idea is made most explicit in his work Discipline and Punish, which deals with the disciplinary power in modern societies. Social relations of power exist on macro and micro levels. As Thacker explains the difference, for Foucault, contrary to Lefebvre, "the history of spaces is not the history of relations of production, but of relations of power." [28] Of particular interest is Foucault's "Of Other Spaces," where he paid peculiar attention to the two main types of space, which "suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect." [29] These types are the utopias (sites with no real place) and the heterotopias, a mix of real and unreal places, which creates a space of illusion or a space that is other. Privileged, sacred, or forbidden places belong to heterotopias, and until recently such places were assigned to the individuals in a state of crisis (adolescents, menstruating women, expecting mothers, the elderly, etc.). Nowadays these heterotopias of crisis are being replaced by what Foucault called "heterotopias of deviation" (such as rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons). They are designated for individuals "whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required norm." [30] Foucault differentiates the following main principles of heterotopias: every culture tends to form its own heterotopia; society can make an existing heterotopia to function differently; "the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several places, several sites that are in themselves incompatible"; it begins to function when a person absolutely breaks with traditional time (this includes sites of accumulated time-museums and libraries-places of all times and simultaneously outside of time) or is linked to the transitory time (for example, the time in the mode of festival); heterotopias presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable; and at last heterotopias have a function in relation to all the space that remains. Foucault's ideas about space as domains of power can be further developed into notion of space as resistance to power. As only within the space of power emerges the space of resistance.

<19> Following Lefebvre, Foucault, and Jameson, among others, Soja has significantly influenced the radical rethinking of the notion of space in the present moment. Drawing upon Martin Buber's 1957 essay "Distance and Relation," Soja connects spatiality with the beginning of human consciousness, stating: "Human beings alone are able to objectify the world by setting themselves apart. And they do so by creating a gap, a distance, a space. This process of objectification defines the human situation and predicates it upon spatiality, on the capacity for detachment made possible by distancing, by being spatial to begin with." [31] Spatial distancing allows a being to differentiate itself from objective reality and become conscious of its humanity. The first created space, separated from the totality, constitutes thus the ontological basis for distinguishing subject and object. Speaking about postmodernity Soja argues that spatiality is the key to making practical, political, and theoretical sense of the contemporary era. He sets his argument about postmodern space within three paths of spatialization: posthistoricism, postfordism and postmodernism. The first one implies the reassertion of space against the grain of an ontological historicism. "The second spatialization is directly attached to the political economy of the material world and, more specifically, to the 'fourth modernization' of capitalism." [32] The term "postfordism" is used to characterize the transformations of the regime of accumulation, mass consumerism and sprawling suburbanization. The third path is connected with the emergence of a new, postmodern culture of space. Postmodernism overlaps with posthistoricism and "postfordism as a theoretical discourse and a periodizing concept in which geography increasingly matters as a vantage point of critical insight." [33] As a postmodern cultural geographer Soja has concentrated his attention on the analysis of space and society and offered new ways of understanding the unjust geographies in which we live. To his mind, spatial theorizations were distorted by short-sighted interpretations of spatiality, which theorized space as a collection of things. Spatiality was "comprehended only as objectively measurable appearances grasped through some combination of sensory-based perception." [34] Accordingly, the social origins of spatiality, its contextualization of politics, power and ideology were neglected. Soja's understanding of space is grounded on the premise that spatiality is a substantiated and recognizable social product, which simultaneously is the medium and the outcome of social actions. The duality of produced space lies in the fact that it is both a product and a producer of social activity.

<20> Although clears connections exist between the concept of space elaborated by Foucault and those developed later by Deleuze and Guattari, there are also significant differences between their poststructuralist theories. If Foucault developed ideas about space in their relation to discourses of power, Deleuze and Guattari thought about space in terms of the architecture of the rizhome. As West-Pavlov observes: "Deleuze's theory of space is not built like a tree, with a central hierarchical trunk from which subordinated 'branches' then spread out, themselves branching off into smaller twig-like subtopics. Rather, his theory of space seems to develop horizontally, spreading out tendrils and runner-shoots which then cross each other at some later point, forming a dense web of allusions and interconnections. The very construction of his theory of space itself evinces strong spatial (rather than linear or hierarchical) characteristics from the outset." [35] Such an unconventional way of thinking causes difficulties in expressing Deleuze and Guattari's theorizing of space in a traditional academic mode. I will concentrate my attention only on some aspects of their notions of space.

<21> In his famous collaborations with Félix Guattari, as in much of his other writings, Deleuze has sufficiently enlarged the conceptual and terminological domain of spatial theory by introducing into it diagram, plane, map, plateau, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and smooth-and-striated spaces. In A Thousand Plateaus (the second volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project), Deleuze and Guattari distinguished between a smooth (heterogeneous) and a striated (homogeneous) space. The latter functions as a locus for the state apparatus and, being a sedentary space, is "striated by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures." [36] While a smooth space is directional rather than dimensional or metric, is intensive rather than extensive, is a "Body without Organs" instead of an organism or organization. In a striated space lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points, contrary to a smooth space in which points are subordinated to trajectory. Despite the dissymmetrical mixes between these two spaces, there are simple oppositions between them. "The smooth and the striated are distinguished first of all by an inverse relation between the point and the line (in the case of the striated, the line is between two points, while in the smooth, the point is between two lines); and second, by the nature of the line (smooth-directional, open intervals; dimensional-striated, closed intervals). Finally, there is a third difference, concerning the surface or space. In striated space, one closes off a surface and "allocates" it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one "distributes" oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of one's crossings (logos and nomos)." [37] The simple opposition between "smooth and striated" gives way to more difficult complications and alterations as far as space is open to the processes of homogeneity or heterogeneity and cannot be seen as stable and static. The above mentioned differences are not objective because it is possible to live striated on steppes or seas and live smooth in cities. Taking this into consideration Deleuze and Guattari described the interaction between spaces through six models.

<22> The principle of mixture and passage from one space to another is not at all symmetrical, but envisions variable modifications. Deleuze and Guattari distinguished the following models: the technological (for example, embroidery, which has a central theme or motif, and patchwork with no center or definite construction; fabric with vertical and horizontal elements and felt with no intertwining and no separation of threads); the musical (for example, octave [a fixed distribution of breaks and intervals], which corresponds to a striated space, and non-octave-forming scales, which are produced through the continuous variation and development of form [smooth space]); and the maritime (although the sea is a smooth space par excellence the astronomical system of navigation employs its strict striation). Regarding the latter, the empirical nomadic system of navigation based on the wind and noise, the colors and the sounds of the seas supported the smooth nature of a sea, but with the advent of astronomical and later map system of navigation a sea became a model of a striated space. It is an example of how a smooth space can be subjugated and occupied by diabolical powers of organization. Therefore the sea is a smooth space open to striation. In the context of the maritime model it is appropriate to speak about the intermingling of spaces, which is explicit in a voyage being not a measurable quantity of movement, but "the mode of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space." [38] Deleuze and Guattari grounded the mathematical model on Riemann's notion of the "mathematical concept" as well as on Husserl and Bon ergson's concept of "multiplicity" that presupposes continuous multiplicities and discrete multiplicities. A Riemann's space, "which presents itself as an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed but not attached to each other," is similar to heterogeneous and amorphous smooth space. [39] If all the above mentioned models serve to exemplify differences between smooth and striated spaces (patchwork vs. weaving, rhythmic vs. harmony-melody, Riemann space vs. Euclidean space) the link between them can be expressed in terms of elementary physics. The physical model gives grounds for Deleuze and Guattari to differentiate between "free action" in smooth space and "work" in striated space. Writing about the aesthetic model and its possibility to represent the differences and overlappings between spaces, the authors distinguished between "close-range" and long-distance vision, between tactile or haptic and optical space. "The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates step by step." In a smooth space one never sees from a distance, is never "in front of," any more than is "in." Orientations change according to temporary vegetation, occupation, and precipitation. On the contrary "striated space is defined by the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, invariance of distance through an interchange of inertial points of reference, interlinkage by immersion in an ambient milieu, constitution of a central perspective." [40] The opposition between the striated and smooth is not simple; we see that one requires the other, that one gives rise to the other and at last one tends to become the other.

<23> Particular attention is warranted to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of geophilosophy, outlined in the collaborative work What is Philosophy?, which contested against the reduction of philosophy to its history. Philosophy continually wrests itself from its history "in order to create new concepts that fall back into history but do not come from it." In its turn geography unlike history stresses contingency rather than necessity, milieu rather than origin. Geography "is not confined to providing historical form with a substance and variable places. It is not merely physical and human but mental, like the landscape." [41] Deleuze and Guattari underline the necessity to locate philosophy in a territory, in particular to "reterritorialize modern philosophy on Greece as form of its past." The separation of geography and philosophy led to the situation when "we possess concepts-after so many centuries of Western thought we think we possess them-but we hardly know where to put them because we lack a genuine plane, misled as we are by Christian transcendence." [42]

<24> Deleuze and Guattari argued for the development of geophilosophy, which was in their view founded by Nietzsche, who determined the national characteristics of French, English and German philosophy. Those were the three countries that collectively produced philosophy in the capitalist world. As for Italy and Spain, they "lacked a 'milieu for philosophy, so that their thinkers remained 'comets'." [43] Today geophilosophy finds a way in reterritorializing itself in conformity with the spirit of a people of a particular place. For example, writing about the origins of Greek philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari stated that it appeared as result of milieu and geography rather that of an origin and a history.

<25> Deleuze and Guattari's notions about nomadology and geophilosophy have provided the foundation for the geocentric approach of Westphal's geocritical literary studies. A geocritical approach revises the correlation between literary representation and geographical referent first of all through denying the assumption that "representation remains a slave to reality." [44] Rather than studying how a fictional depiction conforms to a "real" place, geocritical theorists take the spatial referent as the basis for their analysis, which allows them "to inscribe space in a mobile perspective." [45] Similar to Deleuze's idea that a book is not an image of the world, but forms a rhizome with the world, deterritorializes the world, while the world reterritorializes the book, geocritics rethink the correlation between fictional and real places. Westphal has defined four cardinal points of geocritical approach, multifocalization, polysensorality, stratigraphy, and intertextuality, which I will summarize in the following paragraphs.

<26> By rejecting the egocentered form of imagological analysis, which focuses on the subjectivity of the artist, geocriticism puts together different representations of one and the same space. Therefore it helps to avoid fixing the referent in a monologic narrative. The spectrum of individual representations and negotiation between them allows conceiving a locus in its diversity and permanent performativity. In particular, Westphal states, "The study of the viewpoint of an author or of a series of authors, which inevitably posits a form of identity, will be superseded in favor of examining a multiplicity of heterogeneous points of view, which all converge in a given place, the primum mobile of the analysis. A multifocal dynamic would be required for this analysis. Without hesitation, I would say that multifocalization is the chief characteristic of geocriticism." [46] The multifocal perspective implies the necessity to bring together as many texts as possible including both literary and nonliterary. The distinguishing feature of geocriticism is its concentration on understanding of a given place through the problematics of representation rather than studying a given set of representations. This can be achieved through the comparative mode of analysis which presupposes dialogical understanding of the chosen place. As Westphal points out, "geocriticism actually continues to assign supremacy to the artist, but it no longer places the artist at the center of the universe. […] Also the bipolar relationship between otherness and identity is longer governed by a single action, but by interaction. The representation of space comes from a reciprocal creation, not simply a one-way activity of a gaze looking from one point to another, without considering the other, reciprocating gazes (as in Eurocentrism, for example). Geocritical analysis involves the confrontation of several optics that correct, nourish, and mutually enrich each other." [47] A variety of viewpoints provides a rhizomatic paradigm for the understanding of a place. It is important to mention that multifocalization implies not only concentration on different representations of a space, but also on their intersections, as they give the possibility to figure out conflicting and concurring zones.

<27> As far as we experience an environment through all our senses it is necessarily to consider not only visual perception, which is the dominant, but also other modes of receiving information. Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place writes that "Experience is a cover-all term for the various modes through which a person knows and constructs reality. These modes range from the more direct and passive senses of smell, taste, and touch, to the active visual perception and the indirect mode of symbolization." [48] The study of a polysensory perception of the world transforms and enriches our understanding of it as well as gives a way to escape the control of one kind of sense and open new modes of depicting a referent space. "The endogenous, exogenous, and allogeneous points of view find equivalents in the polysensory inveigling of the world, which is perfectly heterogeneous. In terms of representation, space is subject to the infinite variety of sensory perception. We sometimes encounter 'landscapes' dominated by one sense, and sometimes the 'landscapes' are synesthetic." [49] When dealing with a complex and saturated space, we need a polysensory perspective, which, along with a visual colorful referent landscape, includes soundscape, olfactory, and haptic discourses.

<28> The perception of the referent is relative and predetermined by the intention of the observer. In such a case "the degree of conformity of the representation is undecidable," because each presenter is inscribed in his or her own temporal regime. In any single place we are able to perceive the diversity of temporalities synchronously, but also diachronically. In other words "space is located at the intersection of the moment and duration; its apparent surface rests on the strata of compacted time arranged over an extended duration and reactivated at any time. This present time of space includes a past that flows according to a stratigraphic logic. Examining the impact of time on the perception of space is therefore another aspect of geocriticism." [50] Accordingly, heterogeneity of space is to some extent determined by a layering of several temporal curves that function similarly to Deleuze and Guattari "strata." On the other side, heterogeneity is born from an ensemble of asynchronous rhythms, which are inherent to space.The "polyrhythmic body" of space corresponds to the understanding that "a space is not one in a moment", just as "the city is never synchronous with itself." [51] Thus geocriticism using the metaphor of stratification gives the notion of a referent space as a rhizome, as a stratum of nonsimultaneity, as a constellation of singularity and plurality.

<29> Italo Calvino in his autobiographical writings Hermit in Paris speculates: "Before being a city of the real world, Paris for me, as for millions of other people in every country, has been a city that I have imagined through books, a city that you appropriate when you read." [52] The space is formed in our imagination as a result of intertextual construction and is first of all a text, which is interconnected with other texts. Geocriticism aims to reconstruct the intertextual trajectory that leads to a particular representation of space. Every text about a referential space is succeeded by another text and "so on in an endless chain in which the layers of paper pile upon one another with the beautiful regularity of geological and archeological strata." [53] Accordingly the text is not born of the space, but of other texts to which the space has been a referent.

<30> One more dimension of geocritical intertextuality lies in the sphere of interconnectedness between space and text. They blend together and become inseparable, a unity of the real and imaginary. In such symbiosis it is impossible to search for credibility of the real, as the latter (the real) just simply does not exist. "The writer is the author of the city, the demiurge of places," who is located in myriads of geographical visions. That is why a space is always in the process of transformation, mobility, and reactualization. Accordingly we will in vain look for the "real" places of Dostoevsky's Saint Petersburg, Joyce's Dublin, Kafka's Prague, Doyle's London. Reading a text influences our perceiving of a space, "the page and the stone interweave." [54]

<31> Cultural geographers as well as literary geocritics support the idea that a "real" place is directly connected with a discursive framework. Soja deconstructs the traditional concept of urban space through figuring out the relations between what is termed "reality" and the discursive, establishing the notion of space as simulacrum. Michel Butor seeks a reconciliation between the space and a text and discusses "the city as a literary genre." In the context of geocritical intertextuality Westphal argues: "But intertextuality is not really a lonely walk through the woods of novels and other literary genres. Space, grasped through the representation that texts sustain, can be 'read' like a novel. One reads space; one traverses a text; one reads a text as one traverses space. In this expanded view of textuality, which encompasses equally bookish architexture and spatial architecture, textuality eventually escapes the closed logic that confines the text within a textual 'system'." [55] In the paradigm of such intertextuality there is no radical separateness between space and text.

<32> Drawing upon these rich traditions of spatial theory, the geocritical approach, as developed by Westphal, Tally, and Prieto, among others, can also be broadened through integrating different vistas: phenomenology, semiotics, geography, and sociology along with posthumanism, postpositivism, and New Materialism. The crossroads of these spheres of knowledge will extend the discourse on space, and make possible new spatial and critical interventions in the future.

Notes

[1] Neil Smith, "Foreword," in Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xiii.

[2] Russell West-Pavlov, Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze (Amsterdam and New York: Oxymoron, 2009), 17.

[3] Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22.

[4] Quoted in Don Mitchell, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 61.

[5] Barney Warf and Santa Arias, The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1.

[6] Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 3.

[7] Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 17.

[8] Ibid., 18. Tally refers to Leonard Goldstein, The Social and Cultural Roots of Linear Perspective (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1988).

[9] Tally, Spatiality, 18.

[10] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 1991), 73.

[11] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. W. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996), 397.

[12] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 205.

[13] Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 299.

[14] See Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity. Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

[15] Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 301.

[16] Ibid., 293.

[17] Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso,1989), 18.

[18] West-Pavlov, Space in Theory, 25.

[19] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 16.

[20] West-Pavlov, Space in Theory, 22.

[21] Ibid., 23.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 175.

[24] Ibid., 299.

[25] Ibid., 184.

[26] Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 56-57.

[27] Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 196.

[28] Thacker, Moving through Modernity, 24.

[29] Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," 24.

[30] Ibid., 25.

[31] Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 132.

[32] Ibid., 61.

[33] Ibid., 62.

[34] Ibid., 122.

[35] West-Pavlov, Space in Theory, 171.

[36] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), 381.

[37] Ibid., 480-481.

[38] Ibid., 482.

[39] Ibid., 485.

[40] Ibid., 493-494.

[41] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 96-97.

[42] Ibid., 101.

[43] Ibid., 103.

[44] Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 112.

[45] Ibid., 113.

[46] Ibid., 122. See also Eric Prieto, "Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond," in Robert T. Tally Jr., ed., Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13-27.

[47] Westphal, Geocriticism, 113.

[48] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 8.

[49] Westphal, Geocriticism, 134.

[50] Ibid., 137.

[51] Ibid., 138.

[52] Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, trans. Martin McLaughlin (New York: Random House, 2007), 167.

[53] Westphal, Geocriticism, 155.

[54] Ibid., 158.

[55] Ibid., 164, 168.

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