CHAPTER III

THEORISING THIRD SPACE AND SPATIAL SUBJECTIVITY

Henri Lefebvre’s and Michel Foucault’s spatial theorisations become fundamental for the

‘Third Space’1 thinking of Edward Soja, Homi Bhahba and others. Such theorisation is

significant as it re-enforces the spatiality of human existence and the materiality of ‘lived

space’ as a continuous struggle and contestation in terms of multiple identities and plural

forms of human existence; hence, it endorses spatiality with more equity and justice.

Moreover, the spatiality is not only open for new constellation of plural and multiple

existences; but the understanding of spatiality must also transcend the bipolarity of

modernity, hence, open for multiple and varied meaningful conceptions. The notion

“Third” refers to the constructing and re-constructing of identity, to the fluidity of spaces,

to the space where identity is not fixed and such is the feature of any kind of spatial

existence. The contemporary discussion about spatiality is also specific about the

methodological debate on spatial imperative of subjectivity that all kinds of spatiality pre-

suppose some kind human subjectivity and all kinds of subjectivity presuppose some kind

of human spatiality and such also include the notion of agency in spatial practices.

Therefore, the understanding of spatiality today cannot ignore the third space

dimension in spatial practice. The spatial taxonomies like third space, migratory,

hybridity, liminality, marginality, interstices, space of resistance etc. are conceived as

postmodern and post-colonial conceptions of social space. These terms could categorically

be called as Third space and become part of methodological discourse. The ramifications

1
‘Third Space’ is understood as mode of existence, spatial movements and as way of knowing
(epistemology) the spatiality. The terms are also used with both capital letter and small letter, and
sometimes as single term without space in between. In this thesis these terms are indiscriminately used.
of these things are significant for the conception of spatiality as ‘spatial complexes’ as one

such in our study. The first part of this chapter focuses on the third space theories of

Edward Soja, Homi Bhabha and others; and the second part focuses on the conception of

spatial subjectivity in which the earlier debates on subject/actor (structure/agency) role in

the constitution of society and the subjectivity theories of Foucault and Jacques Lacan, and

Louis Althusser’s ideological interpellation of subject are discussed.

Soja’s Theory of Space and His Strategy of ‘Thirding-as-Othering’

2
Edward Soja understands third space as “open-ended set of defining moments”3

which allows radical openness in the understanding of spatiality of life. His

conceptualisation of spatiality as third space is a progression through different works. In

Postmodern Geography: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory he made a strong

pitch that critical human geography needed to look beyond the resources of Marxism to a

social theory informed by postmodernism. Drawing from Foucault, Lefebvre and so on,

Soja argues that postmodern social science must abandon the “modernist myth of linear

narratives” which emphasise progressive, universal and historical anchor; and that social

science must emphasise spatial studies rooted in locality and particularity through

attention to human geography. He identified Lefebvre’s theory of spatiality as a

revolutionary form of analysis of space opposed to an “enduring epistemological

presence” of the “historical imagination”, which persists in “defining the very nature of

critical insight and interpretation” which tended to exclude “critical sensibility to the

spatiality of social life”.4 His analysis shows that city is a complex web of relation that

2
Edward W. Soja is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a geographer and an
urban planner. He was behind the forming and naming of L.A. School and promoting it as the vanguard
of postmodern geography. He has written extensively on urban geography, regional planning and the
links between social and spatial theory.
3
Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real- and-Imagined Places, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996, p. 260.
4
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geography ... Op. cit. pp. 10 – 11.

114
cannot easily be captured by notions of progression from industrial to post-industrial

modes of production. City itself is a fragmented world and is better understood in terms of

spatial relations. Therefore, while theorising space he challenges the hegemony of

“essentially historical epistemology” and calls for a critical theory that “re-entwines the

making of history with the social production of space, with the construction and

configuration of human geographies”.5 Like Foucault, Soja takes issue with what he

regards as an imperious, historicist paradigm in which space “still tends to be treated as

fixed, dead, undialectical; time is richness, life, dialectic, the revealing context for critical

social theorization”.6 He further opined that historicism is an overdeveloped historical

contextualisation of social life and social theory that actively submerges and peripheralizes

spatial imagination.7

Soja introduces the notion ‘Thirdspace’ through the work Thirdspace: Journey to

Los Angeles and Other Real- and-Imagined Places and invites us to “think differently

about the meaning and significance of space and those related concepts that compose and

comprise the inherent spatiality of human life: place, location, locality, landscape,

environment, home, city, region, territory and geography”.8 He introduces this

epistemological notion ‘Thirdspace’ to emphasise new ways of thinking about space in

order to establish an equal primacy of what he called “third existential dimension”.9 His

aim is not to abandon the historicality in the modernist thought but assert the importance

of historicality, sociality and spatiality in understanding social processes. Even though he

draws heavily upon postmodernist thought and its critique of modern epistemology and

ontology which involves a rejection of totalising metanarratives, he does not dismiss

5
Edward Soja, ‘History, Geography, Modernity’ in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed., Simon During,
London: Routledge, 1993, p.137.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., p. 140.
8
Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles … Op. Cit., p. 1.
9
Ibid., p. 3.

115
modernist approach rather purposively construct a critical tension between postmodernism

and modernism out of which emerge the domain of Thirdspace. It is the domain in which

spatiality comes into its own as a genuinely constitutive element in the structuring of the

world. Drawing upon Lefebvre who identified the centrality of space, Soja argues,

... that all social relations become real and concrete, a part of our lived existence, only
when they are spatially ‘inscribed’ that is concretely represented in the social production
of space. Social reality is not just coincidentally spatial, existing in space, it is
presuppositionally and ontologically spatial. There is no unspatialized social reality. There
is no aspatial social process. Even in the realm of pure abstraction ... there is a pervasive
and pertinent, if often hidden, spatial dimension.10

Thirdspace is also the domain which seeks to go beyond simple dualistic, binary or

bicameral approaches and set different modes of spatial thinking. Spatiality is either seen

as concrete material forms to be mapped, analysed, and explained; or as mental constructs,

ideas about and representations of space and its social significance. Soja critically re-

evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, one that comprehends both the

material and mental11 dimensions of spatiality and look for multiple perspectives to

construct the knowledge of spatiality. He writes,

Enter a space of extraordinary openness, a place of critical exchange where the

geographical imagination can be expanded to encompass a multiplicity of perspectives that
have heretofore been considered by the epistemological referees to be incompatible,
uncombinable. It is a space where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed
simultaneously without privileging one over the other; where one can be a Marxist and
post-Marxist, materialist and idealist, structuralist and humanist, disciplined and
transdisciplinary at the same time.12

Soja termed the Thirdspace domain of spatiality as ‘Thirding-as-Othering’ or trialectics

and exploration of such space and spatiality is described as ‘journeys’ to what he calls ‘the

real-and-imagined’.13

10
Ibid., p. 46.
11
Material and mental are not treated by Soja as binary opposites but as a compound.
12
Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles … Op. Cit., p. 5.
13
Ibid., p.11.

116
 Soja identified three spatial notions like ‘Firstspace’, ‘Secondspace’ and

‘Thirdspace’ to explain spatiality. Thirdspace is built upon Firstspace and Secondspace

perspectives as a creative recombination and extension of them. Firstspace is the context

in which ‘history’ and ‘social’ are dominant but spatial is peripheral. It is the ‘real’

material world, the physical or demographic space - the material, physical world and its

territory. It consists mainly of concrete spatial forms, things that can be empirically

mapped, but are also socially produced, as mediums and outcomes of human activity,

behaviour and experience. This materialised physical space can be directly sensed and is

open to relatively accurate measurement and description. This is perceived space and is

apparent in the concrete and mapable geographies of our life-worlds, the space invisibly

surrounds our bodies, the space of complex spatial organisation of the social practices that

shape our action spaces.14 In the case of Secondspace, reality is understood via imagined

representation and spatiality is accounted as constitutive element of the reality of world.

Secondspace perspective is the interpretation of this reality through ‘imagined’

representations of spatiality, i.e. the symbolic representation defining and ordering that

material reality of the Firstspace, or in other words it is the knowledge of the material

reality that is comprehended essentially through thought, and expressed in symbolic

language. Hence the ‘imagined’ geography is defined in conceived space and become the

‘real’ geography. The representations of power and ideology are located in these

dominating mental spaces.15

Soja’s emphasis is on Thirdspace methodology. As it is already mentioned he

draws on postmodernist and postcolonial cultural criticism which reject modernist aspatial

dualisms and binary thinking including Marxist labour-capital dualism and focus on all

14
Ibid., pp. 10ff.
15
Ibid., pp. 66ff.

117
kinds of spatial processes and social practices people do. This rejection is to account for

the marginal and peripheral human existence and social realities and conceive it “as a

space of radical openness, a context from which to build communities of resistance and

renewal that cross the boundaries and double-cross the binaries of race, gender, class and

all oppressively Othering categories”.16 Thirdspace is space and spatiality people

constructed through social practices. It is, for Soja, a “transcending composite of all

spaces”.17It is the space of the “directly lived”, the space of “inhabitants” and “users”,

containing all other real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Even though it draws upon

both the material and mental spaces of perceived space and conceived space as we have

mentioned earlier, it extends beyond them in scope, substance and meaning. It is

simultaneously real and imagined and more.18He writes,

Everything comes in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and concrete,
the real and imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the
differential, structure and agency, mind and body, conscious and the unconscious, the
disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history. Anything which
fragments Thirdspace into separate specialised knowledge or exclusive domains – even on
the pretext to handling its infinite complexity – destroys its meaning and openness.19

Soja’s strategy “thirding-as-Othering”, opens up our spatial “imaginaries” to ways of

thinking without confining to only two alternatives but by interjecting “an-other” set of

choices. This “thirding”, he claims, disrupts, disorders, and begins to reconstitute the

conventional binary opposition into “an-Other” that encompasses, but is more than just the

sum of the two parts.20 Citing Lefebvre, Soja argues that each so-called “thirding” is an

“approximation” that builds cumulatively on earlier approximations that are very

intentionally incomplete, endlessly explorable, resistant to closure or easy categorical

16
Ibid., p. 84.
17
Ibid., p. 62.
18
Ibid., p. 31.
19
Ibid., pp. 56-57.
20
Ibid., pp. 60-70.

118
definitions.21His strategy of “critical thirding” is open for a creative process of

understanding spatiality challenging all conventional modes of thought and “taken-for-

granted epistemologies”.

Soja says that the third space is more important for the discussion of spatiality of

social life. He describes Thirdspace as capable of understanding “dominated spaces”,

spaces of peripheries, margins and the marginalised, disenfranchised minorities, the “Third

Worlds”: capable of understanding the corpo-reality of the body and mind in terms of

sexuality and subjectivity; and in terms of individual and collective identities from the

most local to the most global. Moreover, they are the chosen spaces for struggle, liberation

and emancipation.22 Therefore, they are spaces filled with politics and ideology. They are

spaces that are lived, the spaces that are ignored. For both Lefebvre and Soja each way of

thinking about space and each field of human spatiality – the physical, the mental and the

social – are seen as simultaneously real and imagined, concrete and abstract, material and

metaphorical. No one mode of spatial thinking is inherently privileged or intrinsically

“better” than others as long as each remains open to the re-combinations and simultaneous

character of the “real-and-imagined”.23

Sojs’s theorisation of Thirdspace spatiality is culminated in the work

Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Region in which he attempts to develop new

cultural politics. Such is a comprehensive work in the growing field of critical urban and

regional studies. The main debate is on the geo-historical evolution of urban form and the

dynamic relations between society and space in the specific context of urban

agglomerations. It is an innovative work giving an insightful application of new

approaches to interpret the spatiality of human life. Soja calls “Postmetrpolis” as new
21
Ibid., p. 36.
22
Ibid., p. 68.
23
Ibid., pp.64-65.

119
urbanism; as critical study of cities and regions. It could be otherwise called as

postmodern metropolis which is interpreted as postmodern urbanism.24 In such work Soja

presents three key arguments (1) spatial dimension is inherent in social life and theory (2)

it is possible to theorise spatiality through an “urban-centred geographical imagination”

and (3) by doing so it is possible to develop a critical spatial perspective.

Soja noted that to achieve spatial justice in culturally heterogeneous urban and

other complex societies, the modern equality politics turns out to be increasingly limiting

and ineffective and therefore need new strategies which is implicit in his project of ‘new

cultural politics’. The Thirdspace methodology is integrated to new cultural politics which

is the broader platform where different epistemological and ontological assumptions and

perspectives of spatial knowledge and praxis like cultural turn, postmodern turn and

spatial turn converged into one.25 Therefore, spatial turn is very significant in new cultural

politics not only because of human life, struggles for human existence and identity, social

movements etc. but also there is particularity of space as a central component of social

theory. The theory and practice of new cultural politics are supposed to understand the

spatiality of social life in depth and engage space oriented political movements. Soja

writes,

Distinctive feature of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and
homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the
abstract, general and universal in the light of the concrete, specific and particular, and to
historicize, contextualise and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional,
variable, tentative, shifting and changing.26

He goes on stating,

Postmodern culture with its decentred subject can be the space where ties are severed or it
can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. To some extent, ruptures,
24
Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies …Op. Cit., p. xiii.
25
Ibid., p. 279.
26
Ibid., p. 280.

120
 surfaces, contextuality, and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for
oppositional practices which no longer require intellectuals to be confined by narrow
separate spheres with no meaningful connection to the world of everyday.27

For Soja, if the traditional/modern equality politics mobilizes its radical subjectivity

around taking collective control over the “making of history” then the new cultural politics

of difference, identity and representation, without lessening the powers of its historically

inspired strategies, adds a new source of mobilized consciousness rooted in the more

immediate collective struggle to take greater control over the “making of geography – the

social production of human spatiality”.28He further states,

This involvement in producing and in already produced spaces and places is what all those
who are oppressed, subordinated, and exploited share, and it is this shared consciousness
and practice of an explicitly spatial politics that can provide an additional bonding force
for combining those separate channels of resistance and struggle that for so long have
fragmented modernist equality politics.29

According to Soja the spatial turn in the new cultural politics is an open-ended coalition

politics aimed at addressing the multiple oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and

other individual and collective sources of marginalization and inequality. It is mobilised

around a shared “spatial consciousness”, an awareness that oppression, marginality, and

inequality are produced and reproduced spatially, spatial processes and through

restructured socio-spatialities.

There are many movements around the world such as spatial movements for justice

concerns and other human rights. There are more inclusionary movements – moving

beyond older boundaries and beginning to reshape new intercultural coalitions that

consciously combine formerly separate and often antagonistic groupings.30The social

movements are becoming spatial movements responding directly to the geographically

27
Ibid., p. 281.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid., p. 282.

121
uneven effects of globalization, postfordist economic restructuring and reconfiguration of

urban form. These socio-political movements are opening up new spaces of resistance in

the new cultural politics as concrete sites for progressive political action.31This is new or

emerging cultural politics of space is more critical, cultural, postmodern, to formulate new

spatial perspective capable enough to address the requirement of contemporary society.

Soja has developed spatial concepts Synekism, Fractal and Archipelago to

facilitate the contemporary urban studies. Synekism is coined by Soja himself to refer the

dynamic formation of the polis state – the union of several small urban settlements under

the rule of the capital city. It is “the stimulus of urban agglomeration”. From a social

science point of view, it is a nucleated and hierarchically nested process of political

governance, economic development, social order, and cultural identity.32 Fractal is used to

configure the discourse about the multiplying and cross-cutting social mosaic that have

developed in city spaces: that the term is to describe the combined and interactive

spatiality and sociality of urban and regional forms. Soja defines,

a fractal is anything that contains in its parts self-similar images of the whole ... as the
blood vessels in the hand, which resembles the entire circulatory system of the body. This
was an appealing quality, suggesting that each piece of the restructured socio-spatial
mosaic can be seen as a kind of social hieroglyph representing and revealing all the
complex dynamics of the postmetropolitan transition, much as Marx used a simple
commodity such as a pin or a pair shoes to open up a critical discussion of the inner
working of the whole capitalist economy.33

He goes on to state,

there is also a compelling analogy here to my argument about lived space. Adapting a
critical thirdspatial perspective allows us to see in every empirical site, from the body to
the global sphere, the fundamental nature of the spatiality of human life, in all its richness
and complexity, much as an individual biography or a social history opens up possibilities
to consider all aspects of the general human conditions.34

31
Ibid.
32
Ibid. pp.13-14.
33
Ibid., p. 283.
34
Ibid.

122
He affirms that the theory of fractals has another appealing feature, one which both

constrains and enables a deeper understanding of localized geographies. It has developed

in close association with chaos theory35, as attempt to make sense of extraordinary

complexity, to explicate what appears to be disordered, and chaotic in ways that make the

resplendent chaos more comprehensible. That is, the spaces with chaotic spatial and social

configurations could be understood with significant patterns through different set of

interpretive lenses.36

Archipelago is borrowed from Foucault and Soja uses such concept to identify the

social and spatial control through privatisation, policing, surveillance, governance and

design of the built environment. Landscapes and spaces become protected and fortified

against the real and imagined dangers of daily life. Postmetropolis represents a collection

of carceral cities, an archipelago of “normalised enclosures” and fortified spaces that both

voluntarily and involuntarily barricade individuals and communities in visible and not-so-

visible urban islands, overseen by restructured forms of public and private power and

authority.37There is an obsession with physical security systems, with the architectural

policing of social boundaries and it has become a ‘zeitgeist’ of urban spatial restructuring,

a ‘master narrative’ in the built environment. The urban spatial form is “fortress” cities

brutally divided between “fortified cells” of affluent social class and the underclass of

“other” who live in a “place of terror” where the police battle the criminalized poor. There

is a tendency to merge urban design, architecture and police apparatus into a single

comprehensive security-effort cutting all kinds of social relations with the less privileged

35
Chaos theory generally concerned with making order out of chaos – both complicated and complex
situations of disorder. Chaos theory as such is part of classical mechanics and mathematics and the
notion of fractals itself is developed as part of chaos theory in order to address complex behaviour of
systems.
36
Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies …Op. Cit., p. 283.
37
Ibid., p. 299.

123
other; hence the architectural built environment and other apparatuses and offices

differentiate and segregate.38 Moreover, the architectonics of security-obsessed urbanism

destroyed public spaces by privatising it and all pseudo-public spaces-sumptuary malls,

office centres, culture acropolises etc. are full of invisible signs warding off the underclass

“Other”. In the same manner the privatising of public spaces and archipelagoising of both

private and public spaces is a real experience of every society today: the distinction

between private and public vanishes or become all the more blurred. This architectonics of

policing through archipelago is a new epistemology of policing by supplanting the

surveillance knowledge of traditional patrolman.39

Soja has developed and used these three spatial concepts to highlight the

significance of space in conceiving social reality even though it is with reference to

complex urban cities; and such is the experience of every society today. Moreover, he

developed such concepts as part of his thirdspace theory. To develop Thirdspace, he drew

much on the concepts trialectics of Lefebvre and the heterotopologies of Foucault; but he

derived such term from Homi Bhaba, a postcolonial and post-structural literary critic, for

whom the postcolonial writings on cultural syncretism and hybridity provided a ‘third

space’ that transgresses the black-white racial dualism. The following session explores

Thirdspace conceptualisation by Homi Bhaba.40

Homi Bhabha adheres to political-economic notions of the exploitation of the

Third World by the First. He has clear affinity with political economy and socialism, but

38
Ibid., p. 300.
39
Ibid., pp. 300-307.
40
Homi K. Bhabha belongs to the black British Tradition of postcolonial debate along with Stuart Hall
and Paul Gilroy. He is highly influenced by Edward Said (the author of Orientalism (1979) which set a
paradigm for postcolonial studies), Frantz Fanon (the black writer who wrote the classical works Black
Skin, white Masks (1986); and The Wretched of the Earth (1988) which narrate the conditions of black’s
existence in a white man’s world) and Jacques Lacan, a psycho analyst who theorised the significance
of language in the formation of human subjectivity.

124
wants to create a culturally appositional politics. Therefore, he makes a postmodern move

away from the singularities of class or gender as primary analytical categories to produce

an awareness of the multiple subject positions inhabiting any claim to identity in the

contemporary world. For him, the act of cultural enunciation is crossed by the difference

of writing. That is, interpretation is never a simple act of communication between the I and

the You, but rather: “The production of meaning requires that these two places be

mobilised in the passage through a Third Space” representing the general conditions of

language and the implication of the utterance in a performative strategy of which it cannot

“in itself” be conscious.41His writings explore the nature of cultural differences or what he

calls the ‘location of culture’. He says, “with the notion of cultural differences, I try to

place myself in that position of liminality, in that productive space of the construction of

culture as difference, in the spirit of alterity or otherness”.42This “productive space” is

distinct from the liberal relativist perspective on “cultural diversity” and

“multiculturalism”: the liberal tradition recognises the existence of diverse, distinct ethnic

and cultural traditions with relative importance, individual autonomy and freedom; and

thus promotes multiculturalism, the co-existence of diverse cultural community with its

uniqueness. Bhabha noticed that the acknowledgement of these cultural diversity and

multiculturalism in Western liberal tradition is a form of control and containment since

these are understood within their own grid of universalist framework.43For him, cultural

differences are often incommensurable, not neatly categorised, triggering observation for

identifying a “third space” of alternative articulation. He makes this argument in

connection with the critique of colonial discourse and says, whose, “predominant function

is the creation of space for a ‘subject people’ through the production of knowledge in
41
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 36.
42
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’ In Jonathan Rutherford, (ed.),
Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990a, p. 209.
43
Ibid., p. 208.

125
terms of which surveillance is exercised and a complex form of pleasure/unpleasure is

incited”.44Bhabha introduces the concept of ‘hybridity’ against the containment of cultural

differences and challenges all hegemonies structured through binary antagonism. For him,

... all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But the importance of
hybridity is not … to race two original moments from which the third emerges, rather
hybridity is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. This third space
displaces the histories that constitute it, and set up new structures of authority, new
political initiatives … The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different,
something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and
representation.45

Therefore, for Homi Bhabha, cultural hybridity encourages a radical proliferation that

gives rise to something different, new and unrecognisable area of negotiation and

representation. To him this hybridity is third space and he locates it in the margins of

human existence and “it is from the affective experience of social marginality that we

must conceive a political strategy of empowerment and articulation”.46It is an intervention

47
and an alternative space of enunciation and is mainly associated with the experience of

postcoloniality. Bhabha locates the origin of the notion ‘cultural difference’ and hybridity

within colonial discourse itself where it is articulated as resistance to ‘colonial authority’ –

a process by which in the very practice of domination the language of the master becomes

hybrid. The field of signification of colonial cultural differences announces a modality of

misappropriations of signs that produces a discursive instability at the level of enunciation;

a productive ambivalence which deconstructs the fixity of the boundaries

(coloniser/colonised) of colonial discursivity and construct hybrid identities.48 He writes,

44
Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’ In R.
Fergusion et al. (eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Cambridge: MIT Press,
1990b, p. 75.
45
Homi Bhabha, The Third Space … Op. Cit., p. 211.
46
Homi Bhabha, ‘Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt’ In L. Grossberg et.al (eds.), Cultural
Studies, New York and London: Routledge, 1992, p.56.
47
Homi Bhabha, The Location … Op. Cit., p.39.
48
Ibid.. P.38.

126
 It is significant that the productive capacities of the third space have a colonial or
postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory … may
reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way
to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism
or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To
that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’-the cutting edge of translation and
negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture …
And by exploring this third space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as
others of our selves.49

The notion hybridity or third space of Homi Bhabha is a floating metaphor for a

critical historical consciousness that privilege spatiality over temporality; but the privileging of

spatialization is not ahistorical and timeless rather he tries creatively to spatialize temporality.

This is an envisioning of cultural politics of third space, an effective consolidation that helps to

dislodge its entrapment in hegemonic historiography and historicism. In the introductory

chapter of his above cited work The Location of Culture he writes:

It is the trope of our time to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond. At
the century’s edge, we are less exercised by annihilation – the death of the author – or
epiphany the birth of the “subject”. Our existence today is marked by a tenebrous sense of
survival, living on the borderlines of the “present”, for which there seems to be no proper
name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix “post”:
postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism ... The beyond is neither a new horizon,
nor a leaving behind of the past ... we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space
and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present,
inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, for there is a sense of disorientation, a
disturbance of direction, in the “beyond”: an exploratory, restless movement caught so
well in ... here and there, on all sides, ... hither and thither, back and forth.
The move away from the singularities of “class” or “gender” as primary conceptual
and organisational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions of race,
gender, generation, institutional location, geographical locale, sexual orientation – that
inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and
politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial
subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the
articulation of cultural differences. These “in-between” spaces provide the terrain for
elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal that initiates new signs of
identity, and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation, in the act of defining the
idea of society itself.
The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-
going negotiation that seeks to authorise cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of
historical transformation. The “right” to signify from the periphery of authorised power
and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition, it is resourced by the power

49
Ibid., pp. 38-39.

127
 of tradition to be re inscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness
that attend upon the lives of those who are “in the minority”.50

He explains further the notion “going beyond” as:

Beyond signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future, but our intimations
of exceeding the barrier or boundary – the very act of going beyond – are unknowable,
unrepresentable, without a return to the “present” which in the process of repetition,
becomes disjunct and distance – to live somehow beyond the border of our times – throws
into relief the temporal, social differences that interrupt or collusive sense of cultural
contemporaneity ... If the jargon of our times – postmodernity, postcoloniality,
postfeminism – has any meaning at all it does not lie in the popular use of the “post” to
indicate sequentiality – after feminism; or polarity – antimodernism. These terms that
insistently gesture to the beyond, only embody its restless and revisionary energy if they
transform the present into an expanded and excentric site of experience and empowerment
... If the interest of postmodernism is limited to a celebration of the fragmentation of the
“grand narratives” of postenlightenment rationalism then, for all its intellectual
excitement, it remains a profoundly parochial enterprise.51

He goes on stating:

Being in the “beyond”, then, is to inhabit an intervening space, as any dictionary will tell
you. But to dwell “in the beyond” is also as I have shown, to be part of a revisionary time,
a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human,
historic commonality; to touch the future on is hither side. In that sense, then, the
intervening space “beyond” becomes a space of intervention in the here and now.52

Hence, the going beyond is the spatial act of intervention to revisit and reconstruct

subjectivities in order to inhabit multiple positions of subjects as an enunciation of cultural

difference. Thus Homi Bhabha’s notion hybridity/third space connects spatial concerns

with cultural politics to provide multiple identities challenging all the binaries which are

part of homogenisation and universalisation of human existence with singular analytical

categories. He advocates supplementary readings by focusing on "hybridization" of

discourse to locate space of "empowerment" and "resistance" for the "other" in allowing

"cultural difference" to emerge. Such space of empowerment and resistance is based on

50
Ibid., pp.1-2.
51
Ibid., p.4.
52
Ibid., p.7.

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the politics of enunciation in particularized resistances (space) for substituting an ethical

empowerment in cultural domination which is seen to be reciprocally dependent on (in

"dialogue" with) the dominated. By establishing primacy of space over time (but within a

temporal axis), he provides an alternative epistemology of thirdspace to accommodate

multiple truth claims by going beyond class or gender. Bhabha’s conception of space

could be demarcated in two different ways: in one hand, space refers to an enunciative

position in the territory of a discourse, an ambivalent thirdspace; and on the other hand,

space refers to a hybrid cultural position, a liminal space between designations of identity,

seen as a site of disruption, intervention and innovation. Therefore, Bhabha’s spatial

discourse mainly comes from the dialectical interplay between these two meanings of

space. And what is more important in Bhabha’s conception is that space as enunciative

political act and as a hybrid cultural position he fore-grounded space as the primary

category to define what is being social.

Now it is clear that heterotopic spatiality, i.e. the third space become key to

contemporary understanding of society. There are many more spatial thinkers who

conceive heterotopic spatiality of human existence. For example, postcolonial black

feminist writer bell hooks writes about ‘heterotopic’ marginality as space of resistance.53

She uses the notion heterotopic as shifting hybridised marginal space of resistance. That

she conceives marginality as space of resistance and solidarity with the marginal can

create shifting and hybridised boundaries of the acceptable, liminal or heterotopic spaces

in which different, often opposed, moral communities can intersect in a less threatening

environment in which they can metaphorically “converse”, thus opening up possibility of

(if not reconciliation) at least acknowledging existence of the other. Therefore, though

frequently a site of abjection, the heterotopic margin can also be a space “where we move

53
bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston: South End Press, 1990, p. 152.

129
in solidarity to erase the category colonizer/colonized. Marginality is the space of

resistance”.54 She recomposes lived spaces of representation as “real-and-imagined”,

“material-and-metaphysical” meeting grounds for struggles against all forms of

oppression. Paul Gilroy, another postcolonial writer, also refers to “rhizomorphic, fractual

structure of transcultural” and syncretised human existence and identity.55 These post

colonial writers make counter hegemonic move by favouring the emergence of hybrid

thirdspace that explores the condition of heterogeneous, unmonolithic formations of

subjectivity and identity.

The postmodern-feminist Doreen Massey advocates the concept of heterogeneous

space; and for her space “is the sphere of the continuous production and reconfiguration of

heterogeneity in all its forms — diversity, subordination, conflicting interests’, which calls

forth ‘a relational politics for a relational space”.56She recognizes lived world as a

“simultaneous multiplicity of spaces: cross cutting, intersecting, aligning with one another,

or existing in relations of paradox or antagonism”.57Massey conceives space in terms of

social relations but such relations of space are experienced differently by people at

different positions in it. Her understanding of space is not simply opposed to time as an

absence or lack: space “releases the spatial from the realm of the dead” 58, relates spatiality

to the social and to power, and makes spatial organization central to sociality. But her

thinking about space challenges influential conceptualizations of space and place as

bounded sites of authenticity, singular, fixed, and unproblematic in their identities.

Massey’s thinking of space is mostly in terms of gender than class relations even though

54
Ibid.
55
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993a, p. 4.
56
Doreen Massey, For Space, London: Sage, 2005.
57
Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p. 3.
58
Ibid., p. 4.

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she theorizes from the feminist-socialist perspective. Five key themes are ramified from

her understanding about space.

1. Space is a social construct.

2. The social is located in space, i.e. the social is spatially constructed.

3. Social space is always dynamic, constituted by changing social relations.

4. Space is also about power – both real and symbolic.

5. Social space might consist of contradictory, even conflictual spaces: it is never

one space but many spaces.

59
Massey is suspicious of grand narratives of modern social theories including Marxism

that suppress multiplicity, difference and alterity in their obsession with temporal

transitions (from tradition to modern, etc.), since she conceived space as changing social

relations and thinking it in terms of multiplicity and dislocations.60

Doreen Massey has also developed a concept called “power-geometries” in

relation to “differentiated mobility”. Writing on the shopping street in London, and more

specifically concerned with the mobility, “differentiated mobility”, of people who are

entangled with power in different ways, she develops the nuanced concept of ‘power-

geometries’ in the following terms:

For different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct ways in
relation to these flows and interconnections. The point concerns not merely the issue of
who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about
power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct
relationships to these anyway-differentiated mobility: some are more in charge of it than

59
Jean-Francois Lyotard is the one who introduced first the idea of grand narratives, its incredulity and
promoting anti-grand narrative projects by favouring plural and heterogeneous conceptions and mode of
existence based on cultures and subcultures. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984.
60
John Agnew, Space : Space, In Paul Cloke and Ron Johnson (eds.), Spaces of Geographical Thought,
London: Sage Publications, 2005, p. 90.

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 others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving
end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.61

She has developed such concept of “power-geometries” to capture the multiple spatialities

of complex environments/places like cities or other spatial contexts where the mobility of

people are differentiated and are intertwined with power and power relations. Massey fore-

grounded space to understand social reality of multiple spatialities in human existence,

like thirdspace theoreticians.

In short, the Third space perspective and methodology of spatiality become the

substantial contour of contemporary spatial discourse which not only prioritised space but

also the realized the ubiquitous subject in the social production and re-production of space

and social reality. Therefore, let us discuss the notion of subject in following section.

Space and Subjectivity

The theorizations of spatiality of social life presuppose some theory of subjectivity

and conversely all forms of subjectivity presuppose some theory of space. The spatial

theories that we have explained in earlier discussions presupposed the component of

human subjectivity in those theories. Henri Lefebvre says,

In reality, social space ‘incorporates’ social actions the action of the subjects both
individual and collective who are born and who die, who suffer and who act. From the
point of view of these subjects, the behaviour of their space is at once vital and mortal:
within it they develop, give expressions to themselves, and encounter prohibitions; then
they perish, and that same space contains their graves.62

These words of Lefebvre highlight the significance and the intertwining relationship

between the subjects and social space. The theorization of Thirdspace, which we have

explained in above section, is more centered on the questions of subjectivity and identity.

61
Doreen Massey, Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place, In Bird et. all (eds.), Mapping the
Futures: Local Cultures, Global change, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 61.
62
Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space, Op.cit ..., pp. 33-34.

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Since subjectivity is an important factor in spatiality it needs more elaborated discussion.

Therefore, theoretical debate on the notion would be followed by different conceptions of

subject and specific spatial theories of subjectivity.

In contemporary conceptions, the notion of subjectivity is inclusive of the notions

of ‘self’ and ‘identity’. Human’s experience of subjectivities and realization of

individualities are related to the ways in which they are distributed as subjects in terms of

both space and time. Subjectivity grounds our understanding of who we are and also

different roles we perform in different specific spatial contexts of individual and collective

existence. These subjectivities are not merely given rather a process and production: the

place and space we inhabit produce us and we are also emplaced in the production of place

and space. In other words, the place and space which produce human subjectivity are also

inversely the social construction of human subjects. Social scientists hold different

positions related to subject formation, the question of subjectivity, the agency in action

etc. which is known as structure/agent or actor and agency debate. The debate is whether

human’s subjective roles, actions, behavior etc. are determined by external objective

structures/factors independent of individual agent and is known as methodological

holism; or it determined by subjective intention or capacity of the actors themselves

without fully denying external influences and is known as methodological individualism.

Agency is the enabling, the capacity to act. Methodological holism is the concern of

objective theories whose conception is that there exist external objective social structures

determining human behavior whereas methodological individualism is the concern of

subjective theories which invest agency with human actors in terms of intention, purpose

etc. The social theories like functionalism, system theory, structuralism etc. belong to the

category of objective theory where structure has primacy over human action. Those

schools of thought belong to hermeneutics, interpretative sociology, rational choice theory

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etc. tend towards subjective understanding of action giving primacy to actor over the

structure. There are also theoretical attempts to transcend structure/agent or actor

dichotomy by integrating both structure and agent in the subject formation and the

structuration of society.63 Contemporary spatial and cultural theories focus more on spatial

discourse and representation in its exploration of subjectivity; and they reject notions of

coherent subject since many cultural, social, political and psychological processes

continually reconstruct subject positions; and also they understand subjectivity and space

as simultaneously as real, imaginary and symbolic.64 Moreover, for such theories the

subject is constitutive of and constituted in spatial practices and their analyses of subject is

63
For example, Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘constructivist
structuralism’. Giddens conceives human subjects as active and knowledgeable agents who produce and
reproduce social structure through their own actions. Regularised and patterned human activity is not
brought into being by individual actors as such, but is continually re-created by them through the very
means whereby they express themselves as actors. That is, in and through their activities agents produce
the conditions that make those activities possible. For example, having been constituted as a man or a
woman by gendered expectations and practices, we then act in accordance with those rules and
expectations, reproducing them again. Central to his theory is the notion of ‘duality of structure’, by
which structures are not only constraining but enabling. The individual actors are determined by social
forces which lie beyond the individual subjects. However, those social structures enable subjects to act.
For Giddens, identities are posed as an issue both of agency (the individual constructs a project) and of
social determination (our projects are socially constructed and social identities ascribed to us). (See
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984.). Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘constructivist structuralism’, and its central
notion ‘habitus’ is also an attempt to overcome the bipolar understanding of structure/agency debate. He
explains the dialectical relations between the subjective and objective features of social life. Bourdieu
speaks of the social world as a ‘space’ (social space) which is constructed out of a set of properties that
are active at any one time. Social relations within this space exhibit the deployment of various forms of
power or capital which may act singularly, or in accordance with each other. The main types of capital
are cultural, social, symbolic and economic capital. These objective forms of power or capital are held
to be neither reducible to the intention of agents nor simply directive of their interactions. Agents are
defined by their relative position to one another and the distribution of people within social relations are
according to the overall volume of capital in their possession and as well as its composition. Bourdieu
holds that agents engage in forms of identification which permit them to distinguish themselves from
other groups. Thus, the struggle for recognition; struggle both individual and collective which purport to
transform or preserve these structures are central part of social life. Habitus is internalised
mindscape/mentality co-related to the socio-cultural order and is where people and institutions meet and
give meanings to their game of life. Bourdieu defined habitus as “systems of durable, transposable
dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles
which generate and organise practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their
outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations
necessary in order to attain them”. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press,
1990. Pierre Bourdieu and Wacquant.L, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press,
1992: Tim May, Situating Social Theory, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996.
64
Robyn Longhurst, ‘Placing Subjectivities, Spaces and Places’ In Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh et al
(eds.), Hand Book of Cultural Geography, London: Sage publication, 2003, p. 283.

134
also in terms of power relations and political resistance to alter such power relations and

subject positions. To enhance such kind of conceptions of subject, the specific theories of

Foucault, Lacan and Althusser would be discussing in following section.

Now let us discuss Foucauldian conception of subjectivity in which our concern here is to

make specific explication of such notion from his theory of space which is already

discussed earlier. Foucault is regarded as the most significant and more controversial

theoretician of subjectivity.

Foucauldian theory of subjectivity

The exploration of Foucauldian theories of space enables us to theorize that for

Foucault human body and space are inseparable entity; and human subjectivity is spatial

subjectivity either as submission to spatial power – the forces of repression, socialization,

disciplining and punishing or as resistance in terms of struggle in the repressed world,

protest for new identity or struggle for liberative becoming for a new subject. That human

body exists in spaces and such body must either submit to authority through incarceration

or surveillance in a panopticized spaces or body exists in carved spaces of resistance and

freedom (heterotopias) from repressive world and in both cases subjects are emplaced in

the space. Therefore, space for Foucault is a site or container of power which constrains or

imprison subject but at the same time liberates processes of becoming of subject. In short

Foucauldian subject is a spatial subject and all kind of spatiality of social life presupposes

certain kind of exercising of subjectivity.

Foucauldian subjects are ‘historical’ and the product of spatial and cultural

discourses as if that constructs subject-positions. For example, discourses of crime,

punishment, medicine, science, sexuality etc. which create object of knowledge about

subject through different epistemic mechanisms. These subjects have attributes as defined

135
by the discourses as the mad man, the hysterical women, the homosexual, the

individualized criminal etc; and these subjects are inserted into such subject positions or

become subject when they are subjected to such spatial and cultural discourses. Foucault

states, “the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or … through practices

of liberation, of freedom … starting of course from a certain number of rules, styles and

conventions that are found in the culture”.65 These cultural discourses and the figures of

subjects are specific to specific discursive regimes and historical periods. Therefore the

ontological musings of Foucauldian subject is anti-essentialist and is purely a historical

ontology.

Foucauldian subject is never fully constituted in subjection because wherever there

is power there is resistance. He never suggests that discourses turn subjects into

automatons. Instead, there are spaces of resistance, revolt, struggle against socially

imposed constraints etc (the heterotopic spaces) where the subject become an agent of

change (political subject), a concrete resisting human being. Judith Butler, in her work The

Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection rightly observes it as:

For Foucault the subject who is produced through subjection is not produced at an instant
in its totality. Instead, it is in the process of being produced, it is repeatedly produced
(which is not the same as being produced again and again). It is precisely the possibility of
a repetition which does not consolidate the dissociated unity, the subject, but which
proliferates effects undermine the forces of normalization.66

Christopher Falzon has also observed that the ‘subject’ of Foucault is not always subjected

in subjection rather a concrete resisting human being engaged in transformative politics,

hence an agent of change.67 Therefore, it would be understood that, for Foucault, the social

65
Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966-1984, Sylvere Lotringer (ed.), New York: Semiotext,
1989, p 313.
66
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997, p. 93.
67
Christopher Falzon, Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation, London: Routledge, 1998,
p. 52.

136
definitions of subjects through different spatio-cultural discourses cannot simply imprinted

on passive subjects since subjects are not cultural dopes rather they respond to prevailing

discourses in many ways. More significantly, ‘subject’ are constituted and at the same

time constitutive: subjected and subject of history.

Foucault’s social constructionist view of subjectivity rejects enlightenment ideal of

full self-knowledge and self-aware agency-ridden autonomous trans-historical subject

since he places the subject formations within a broader concept of historically contingent

‘discourse’.68Tony Davies, with regard to Foucauldian discourse, draws some analogies

with other theorists as follows:

Discourse for Foucault is what the relations of production are for Marx, the unconscious
for Freud, the impersonal laws of language for Saussure, ideology for Althusser: the
capillary structure of social cohesion and conformity. It situates us as individuals, and
silently legislates the boundaries of what is possible for us to think and say. Above all, it is
normative: not because transgression and dissent are impossible … but because they too
are “grammatical”, already anticipated and positioned in the hegemonic syntax of
discursive power.69

Foucault conceived that in “every society the production of discourse is at once controlled,

selected, organized and redistributed,” that however “humdrum and grey it may seem,”

“behind these words” lies a myriad of “conflicts, triumphs, injuries, dominations and

enslavements”.70 He was much concerned with the multifaceted and multivalent

relationship between power and discourse and also the history of subjectivity that the way

subjects experience themselves in a game of truth. Thus he summarizes his project as:

68
Foucauldian concept of discourse is a broader concept inclusive of all forms of representations and
discursive formations, and human practices and mechanisms for the conveyance of meaning and value
and constructions of knowledge, truth etc. For example, Foucault’s study of discourses of madness
included: statements about madness which give us knowledge about madness; the rules which prescribe
what is ‘sayable’ or ‘thinkable’ about madness; subject who personify the discourse of madness, i.e. the
‘madman’; the process by which discourses of madness acquire authority and truth at a given historical
moment; the practices within institutions which deals with madness; and the idea that different
discourses about madness will appear at later historical moments, producing new knowledge and a new
discursive formation. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, London: Tavistock, 1973.
69
Tony Davies, Humanism, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 70.
70
Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, Op. cit …, p. 216.

137
 to study the constitution of subject as an object for himself, the formation of the
procedures by which the subject is led to observe himself, analyze himself, interpret
himself, recognize himself as a domain of possible knowledge. In short, this concerns the
history of “subjectivity,” if what is meant by that term is the way in which the subject
experiences himself in the game of truth where he relates to himself.71

For Foucault, the discourse itself is complex and the power is not always exercised in a top-

down fashion hence requires a multidimensional approach to grasp it in its complexity. His

notion “polyvalence of discourses” is aimed at to address it. In The History of Sexuality,

Volume I, he asserts:

Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it …. We must
make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourses can be both an
instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of
resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces
power; it reinforces, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it
possible to thwart it.72

Foucault explained this polyvalent nature of discourse and the play of power (disciplines of

knowledge as well as the power of the subject to define its own subjectivity) for different kind

of subject formation (even in a reverse form) through the category of “homosexual” that arose

during the nineteenth century. The discourses of psychiatry, jurisprudence etc on the species

of homosexuality to advance social control over them, itself become a reverse discourse to

form a legitimate natural subject homosexual itself using the same vocabulary and categories

by which homosexuality was medically disqualified.73

Foucault also concerned with the question of how subjects are led to focus attention on

themselves, to decipher, recognize and acknowledge themselves as subjects of desire; and how

one recognizes oneself as a subject for oneself involved in the practices of self-constitution,

71
Michel Foucault, ‘Foucault’, In James D. Faubion (ed), Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Essential
Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: The New Press, 1998, p. 461.
72
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York:
Vintage, 1978, pp. 100 – 01.
73
Ibid.

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recognition and reflection.74 Foucault’s concern is also that how we constitute ourselves as

moral subjects of our own action which is part of his thought on ethics - the component of

morality that concerns the self’s relationship to itself. He expounded it by studying the history

of the forms of moral subjectivation which is the subject matter of his work The History of

Sexuality, vol. 2. This work, i.e. Foucault’s thought on ethics as ‘self’s relationship to itself’,

has four main aspects: (1) the ethical substance, that part of oneself that is taken to be the

relevant domain for ethical judgment, (2) the mode of subjection, the way in which the

individual establishes his or her relation to moral obligations and rules, (3) the self forming

activity or ethical work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself into an

ethical subject and (4) the telos, the mode of being at which one aims in behaving ethically.75

This exploration of self’s relation to itself (i.e. ethics) is part of the exploration of

subjectivity itself and also the understanding of how we govern our self to become an ethical

subject; therefore it could be our “technologies of the self”. Technologies of self are the ways

in which we relate ourselves to ourselves, contribute to the forms in which our subjectivity is

constituted and experienced, as well as to the forms in which we govern our thought and

conduct.76 As an intensification of Foucault’s concern of self’s relation of itself he developed

the notion of “the care of the self” as the subject matter of his third volume of The History of

Sexuality. For him, the care of the self is “an intensification of the relation to oneself by which

one constitute oneself as the subject of one’s act”.77 It is an act of ‘taking care of the self’, a

discursive practice of self production as an ethical subject, i.e. the subject that become

constituted is an ethical subject through the process of ‘the care of the self’, therefore ethics is

74
Michel Foucault, The Uses of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley, New York:
Pantheon, 1985, p. 5.
75
Ibid, pp. 26 – 32.
76
Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994,
p. 119.
77
Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: History of Sexuality, Vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley, New York:
Pantheon, 1986, p. 41.

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understood as a mode of ‘care of the self’ (how ones should concern oneself with oneself in

everyday life, i.e. the esthetics of existence). The discursive practice of the interrogation of the

constitution of one’s own self has direct implications in terms of the exercising of human

agency and realization of human subjectivity.

To conclude, Foucauldian subjects, whatever cases it may be, are socially and

historically constituted. The spatiality of social life – the spatio-cultural discourse – is where

the subject is constituted and the subject is also constitutive of such discourses. The subject

can also appropriate discourses reversely by itself to define its own subjectivity differently and

the polyvalent nature of discourse and flow of power to different directions (not always top to

bottom) enable different kinds of such subject formation. Therefore, in Foucauldian

perspective there is subjectivity and agency within and against prevailing discourses. Since

discourse is not static and it changes over time there is shift in social definitions, experiences

and mode existence, the spatiality of social life itself. Now let us move to Lacanian

theorization of subjectivity.

Lacanian conception of subjectivity

Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst for whom psychoanalysis is concerned

with the constitution of subject and such is conditioned by what is conceived as linguistic

turn in social theory. This ‘linguistic turn’78 began with structural linguistics and

78
It is the notion that language is constitutive agent of human consciousness and the social production of
meaning, and that our apprehension of the world arrives only through the lens of language’s pre-coded
perceptions. Moreover, language, once understood as relatively neutral medium of communication,
sufficiently transparent to convey a reasonably accurate sense of reality, itself had been reconceptualised with
the emergence of structural linguistics or semiotics, a movement that began with the publication in 1916 of
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. For Saussure, language was not a transparent mode
of referentiality but instead a “system of differences with no positive terms”. Thus, far from reflecting the
social world of which it is a part, language, he believed, precedes the world and makes it intelligible by
constructing it according to its own rules of signification. Such rules are inherently arbitrary, in the sense of
being social conventions implicitly understood in different ways by differing linguistic communities. Hence
the idea of an objective universe existing independently of speech and universally comprehensible despite
one’s membership in any particular language system is an illusion. See Gabrielle M. Spiegel ‘Introduction’ In
Gabrielle M. Spiegel (eds.), Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic
Turn, New York: Routledge, 2005.

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eventually led to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conception of ‘language game’.79 Linguistic turn

was an ontological and epistemological shift in the conception social reality that language

is constitutive agent of human consciousness and social production of meaning: it put

much emphasis on language and its agency to create reality. Lacan has adopted this

linguistic turn (semiotic analysis) in to his psychoanalytical theory which is mostly

concentrated on the question of subject formation and for him psychoanalysis is tool to

elaborate the notion of subject. He says: “Psycho-analysis is … governed by a particular

aim, which is historically defined by the elaboration of the notion of the subject”.80

Therefore, he reworked the theory of subjectivity and sexuality that are derived from

Freudian corpus by putting it back to signifying practices, the language and symbolic

order. For Lacan, becoming a subject means integration in the symbolic order, i.e. merger

with the environment – the socio-cultural and linguistic horizons – is necessary part of

becoming a subject.

Freudian psychoanalytical conception of human subjectivity was rooted in his

notions of structure of mind (consciousness and unconscious) and personality based on the

conceptual triad of id, ego, and superego, in which id, the primordial instinctual drive, a

sexual energy/dynamism that contribute much towards ones’ own subjectivity and

personality. But Lacanian theory of subject “poses this notion [of subjectivity] in a new

way, by leading the subject back to its signifying dependence”.81 Lacan shifted the

psychoanalytical discussion away from Freudian pathologisation and normalization to

79
In his Philosophical Investigation Wittgenstein suggests that language is a tool used by human animals
to co-ordinate their actions in the context of social relationships. The use of language is pragmatic
narrative or language game for specific purposes. The meaning of language is generated by the practical
context of its action: “the meaning of a word is its use in the language”. Language games are rules-
bound activities and the rules of language constitute our pragmatic understandings of ‘how to go on’ in
society. The rules of language are constitutive rules which are such rules by dint of their enactment in
social practice. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.
80
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, Trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1981, p. 77.
81
Ibid.

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cultural interpretation and human subjectivity formations. This Lacanian subject is also

stripped of all the privileges that would constitute it as autonomous self-consciousness,

master of itself, subjectivity transparent to itself (i.e. his conception is opposite to Cartesian

cogito). For Lacan the subject must be thought as a linguistic being, that is to say, defined by

and on the basis of language, the symbolic and cultural horizon - the discursive context. For

him, “there is no pre-discursive reality whatsoever, for the very reason that what constitutes

community, which … referred to as men, women and children, are nothing but signifiers”.82

That is, the subject sustains only on the basis of discourse.

Lacan was much concerned with the interpretation of the structuring principles of

social identity and then how the ‘unconscious’ become constituted. For Lacan unconscious

is not the pathologised effect as in the case of Freud but it is the “kernel of our being”, the

selfhood and is the effect of language. His famous assertion and rejoinder to Freud is that

“the unconscious is structured like a language”.83 His thesis about the constitution of

human subjectivity is rooted in language and signification. Therefore, he emphasized that

to understand human behavior one must grapple with the rules and processes of human

communication. In Lacanian theory of selfhood, the self is not an essential entity rather

linguistic effect, and constituted as ‘unconscious’ (as the “kernel of our being”) and such

become a great challenge to Western philosophy which regarded the pre-given cogito, the

conscious mind as the essence of selfhood which is encapsulated in the proclamation by

the philosopher Descartes, ‘I think therefore I am’. He reverses the Cartesian dictum into

‘I am where I think not’, that is, in the unconscious, where my true selfhood lies as

linguistic effect. He deconstructed the Freudian discovery of unconscious as the centrality

82
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore, Paris: Seuil, 1975, p. 34. Quoted In Francois Raffoul, Lacan and
The Event of The Subject, In Hugh J Silverman, eds., Cultural Semiosis, New York: Routledge, 1998, p.
64.
83
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: Four Fundamental Concept ..., Op. cit. p. 203.

142
of self itself and as the subject not a stable amalgam of consciousness. That the Lacanian

use of unconscious is radically different from Freudian use of unconscious: for Freud, it is

a depository of pathologized desires and emotions but for Lacan it is a linguistic effect, the

centrality of self, the cultural-giving of one’s own being.

Lacan considers psychoanalysis as a science of ‘unconscious’ which is the

constitution of subject. By the dictum, “unconscious is structured like a language”, he did

mean neither unconscious is ruled by the laws of language nor the content consists in

elements of language nor the content is organized and transformed according to the laws

of the language.84 For Lacan, the subject is a speaking subject and the unconscious is from

the effect of language on the subject, i.e. the subject is constituted by the effect of

language and speech.85It is not some deep level of the psyche, or primitive force in human

beings, but strictly “the dimension in which the subject is determined in the development

of the effects of speech”.86 Therefore, the ‘unconscious is structured like a language’.87 In

short, there can be an unconscious only for the speaking being; and that is why Lacan says

“language is the condition of the unconscious …. The unconscious is the logical

implication of language: indeed there is no unconscious without language”.88 This formula

is concerned with the constitution of the subject and does not pertain to the field of

linguistics. Moreover, for Lacan the subject is caused as an effect of language and is

sustained by the discourse of signifier – the symbolic horizon – and subject is not a pre-

discursive reality, therefore, he says “everything emerges from the structure of the

signifier”.89 Subject is ‘constituted’: subject is a linguistic and symbolic construct. This

84
For more arguments of this kind see Francois Raffoul, Lacan and The Event of The Subject, In Hugh J
Silverman, eds., Cultural Semiosis, New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 66.
85
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: Four Fundamental Concept ..., Op. cit. p. 198.
86
Ibid., p. 149.
87
Ibid., p. 126.
88
Anika Riffet-Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, Bruxells:Charles Dessart, 1970, p. 18.
89
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: Four Fundamental Concept ..., Op. cit. p. 206.

143
process involves a two-way sequence that language creates unconscious and language

reveals unconscious. In other words, the linguistically, symbolically and culturally created

unconscious is available only in linguistically and culturally mediated forms; and there are

signifying chains extended in the hidden world of mental processes.

Lacan developed notions like imaginary, mirror stage, symbolic order as different

registers and phases involved in the constitution of the psychic subject.90 The “Symbolic

order” is the realm of language in which human encounter subsequently, (i.e. after earlier

phases of encountering the linguistic world), to create his or her ‘selves’. By the term

“symbolic order” Lacan refers all the means by which we communicate and make, as well

as replicate, meaning. For him, our very “selves” are created through language: “The form

in which language is expressed itself defines subjectivity … I identify myself in language,

but only by losing myself in it like an object”.91As we enter into symbolic world our

identity through language provides wholeness and mastery of self by minimizing the

90
Lacan positions individuals in a tripartite system of orders – the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real
(the different registers involved in constitution of subject or the contours of self formation of an
individual). Imaginary is closely related to mirror phase and it is the undifferentiated realm of pre-verbal
images and fantasies of a child. Lacan sees Mirror as the onset of the subject through its entry into the
world of the signifier, the spatio-cultural realms. The Imaginary is the order of mirror images in which
the individual repeats its original, alienated ego-identificatory procedures in relation to an external
world of people and objects. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” in Ecrits, Trans. Alan Sheridan,
New York: Norton, 1977. In mirror stage the infant is confronted with her or his own image in the
mirror; the image provides both an illusion of a complete and controllable being that is the “self”, and
also sense of irresolvable tension given the infant’s continuing experience of its body as always
fragmented and incomplete. That the concept “mirror stage” points to the persisting human desire for
self-sufficiency and agency that is always dialectically bound with, and undercut by, feelings of
powerlessness and fragmentation. Lacan concluded that the subject “only perceives the unity of this
specific image from the outside, and in an anticipated manner. Because of this double relation which he
has with himself, all the objects of his world are always structured around the wandering shadow of his
own ego. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in
the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, New York: Norton, 1991. He
calls the internalized mirror image as imago and is the consequent to the psychical internalization of the
image that the ego is founded. Here subjectivity is spatially and ontologically decentred; the subject is
shaped literally from outside in.90 See Virginia Blum and Heidi Nast, Jacques Lacan’s Two-
Dimensional Subjectivity, in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds.), thinking space, New York: Routledge,
2000, p. 183.
91
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, Trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977, pp. 85-86

144
fragmentation even though it engenders new tensions since language itself is unreliable

and unfixable. He explains,

All human beings share in the universe of symbols. They are included in it and submit to
it, much more than they constitute it. They are much more its supports than its agents. It is
as a function of the symbols, of the symbolic constitution of his history, that those
variations are produced in which the subject is open to taking on the variable, broken,
fragmented, sometimes even unconstituted and regressive, images of himself.92

Yet for Lacan, there is a world outside the signifying dimension in the mental and material

worlds, which he calls the Real. But for him, the Real always resists representation and

recovery since all desire is bound up with lack and dissatisfaction and hence fulfillment of

Real is an impossibility.

The subject constituted as linguistic subject is not a totalized unified subject but

subject finds itself “divided,” “destitute” and finally “eclipsed”. The constitution of subject

accompanies an alienation of subject itself and manifests itself in a discursive enunciation

as a speaking subject. The subject is alienated as soon as it appears, since it is represented

by the signifier. “Of course, every representation requires a subject, but this subject is

never a pure subject”.93 For Lacan, the subject has no reality other than a discursive one

and no possible coincidence to itself of the speaking subject. The first effect of the

constituting and alienating power of the signifier over the subject lies in the recognition

that the subject is “petrified” in representation, and therefore separated from truth. This

division is irreducible, for it is constitutive of the very being of the subject. The subject

disappears under the signifiers it becomes as subject- the subject is constituted and

maintained but decentered and divided. It is because the subject is the “subject” of

unconscious which is the effect of language and Lacan makes a striking formula that “the

92
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers … Op .Cit., pp. 157-158.
93
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: Four Fundamental Concept ..., Op. cit., p. 221.

145
subject is at home in the field of the unconscious”.94 There is also an alienating

identifications of subject in a teleological horizon of signifying chain by substitution of

signifiers, i.e. “the signifier represents a subject for another signifier”:

One word for another, this means a word in place of another – a substitution of signifiers –
but also one word in view of another – a sort of internal teleology of the signifying order.
This metaphorical teleology is that through which the subject insists in the signifier, since
it is, we know, ‘what a signifier represents for another signifier.’95

Thus within a chain of signifiers, there is substitution of signifiers and significations are

not established with single signified. Therefore, the subject constituted in the unconscious

is inherently divided and fragmented even though there is signifying order. Lacan also

explores the always-threatening return of fragmentation, however our adult identity may

be secured, in his “imagos of the fragmented body”: “images of castration, mutilation,

dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open the body”.96

Therefore, the fragmented undercurrent of subjectivity is an ontological imperative to

Lacanian subject in the midst of continuing desire for firm grounding, sense of security

and rational self- mastery:

The symbolic function presents itself as a double movement within the subject: man
makes an object of his action, but only in order to restore to this action, in due time its
place as a grounding. In this equivocation operating at every instant lies the whole process
of a function in which action and knowledge alternate.97

The dynamic of fragmented undercurrent in subjectivity underlies Lacan’s

perspective on agency, which is always grounded in tautologies. Lacanian constitution of

subject as an effect of language also assigns agency to subject. That we create our

groundings for action, which we need then to consider authentic since it is a responsible

94
Ibid., p. 36.
95
Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, Trans. Anthony
Wilden, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981, p. 75.
96
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection … Op. Cit., p.11.
97
Ibid., p. 73.

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action for ‘becoming’. He comments: “what is realized in my history is not the past

definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in

what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of

becoming”.98 In Ecrits, Lacan depicts a concrete example of a politically progressively

grounded worker in a production unit (first phase), who think himself as a proletariat

(second phase) and joins in general strike in the “brazen face of capitalist exploitation”

and suggests that our tautologies, our chosen grounding can be politically progressive.99

He affirms further, “there is absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the

guarantors of the bourgeois dream. A little more rigor and firmness are required in our

confrontation with the human condition”.100 Therefore, Lacanian subject is not apolitical

or resigned to indeterminacy or incapacity. The symbolically constituted subject has

agency to be a rational actor and politically sensitive since the symbolic horizon, the

signifying chain attribute agency to subjectivity. Lacan says, “the philosophical cogito is

at the center of the mirage that renders modern man so sure of being himself even in his

uncertainties about himself”.101 Further he says, “I will now dare to define the Cartesian I

think as participating, in its striving towards certainty, in a sort of abortion”.102 In short,

Lacan recognizes a rational self, striving for certainty, truth in its own self but having a

lack in subject; a subjectivity which is not unified by reference to a single positive

principle. That Lacanian subject, a symbolic construct, has agency and is a rational cogito

but still fragmentary and still then progressively politically becoming subject who

radically engage with history and human existence. What we have been discussing so far

is the Lacanian theory of subject which is a linguistic construct and has agency to be

98
Ibid., p. 86.
99
Ibid., p. 74.
100
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960,
Trans. Dennis Porter, New York: Norton, 1997, p. 303.
101
Ibid., p. 165.
102
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: Four Fundamental Concept ..., Op. cit., p. 141.

147
political. Even though Lacan theorised the significance of symbolic horizon in the

constitution of subject he was silent on the way spatial practices create spatial codes and

consequent symbolic structure. His theorisation of subject is also significant to understand

spatial subjectivity since subjects rely on spatial signifiers to act and live. Lacanian

theorisation of subject as linguistic and symbolic construct influenced Julia Kristeva103 to

theorise ‘subject in processes’. Now let us move on to Althusser’s conception of ideology

and subject formation.

Althusserean ideology and subject formation

Louis Althusser, a French philosopher and Marxist influenced theoretician whose

compelling conception of ideology is distinct from Marx that his notion is ideological

interpellation of individuals as subjects which is significant to understand the subject

formation of individuals. Ideology is a key factor in the theorisation of subject and spatial

imperative of subjectivity. The spatial imperative of subjectivities means that we orient

ourselves and are oriented in space; and ideology plays an important role in such orientations.

For Althusser, ideology is a system of representation and set of practices which exist in

different apparatus of society. Althusser’s understanding of human subjectivity is closely

related to the varied material and institutional conditions of human existence.

Althusserian conceptual tools are the product of the intersection between the

Marxian class critique and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His theory brought together structural

Marxist conception of society and Lacanian understanding of the structure of the psyche.

103
Julia Kristeva, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory develops a theory of subject as a ‘subject in
processes’ and she concentrates on the subject – the feminine chora. For her the subject constituted
through ‘symbolic’ – the sphere of representations, images and all forms of articulations – is never a
static phenomenon captured in an imaginary form of one kind or another. More over language is poetic
and fundamentally heterogeneous in nature; it opens the way to a range of new meaning and to new
ways of understanding. Her concern is the connection between language and its importance in the
formation of subject and such is the thesis of her work, Revolution in Poetic Language. See Julia
Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984.

148
His version of social theory is structural Marxism which is significantly different from

Marxian two-tier explanation of social structure (i.e. the base/super structure

understanding of society). In classical Marxian theory ideology has been mainly conceived

as ‘false consciousness’.104 But Althusser advanced it to ask the question how individuals

are actively constituted as subjects through ideology. He laid the way for understanding

ideology as a set of practices which engage us and in which we are always engaged;

therefore his theory of subject becomes cornerstone in thinking about the spatial nature of

subjectivity. James Kavanagh noted that,

Contemporary Marxist theory, deriving largely from the work of Louis Althusser, has
reworked the concept of ideology in the light of the more complex notion of subject-
formation given by psychoanalysis, and more elaborate system of ideological practices
that have developed in late capitalist societies. In this framework, ideology designates a
rich “system of representations”, worked up in specific material practices, which helps
form individuals into social subjects who “freely” internalize an appropriate “picture” of
their social world and their place in it. Ideology offers the social subject not a set of
narrowly “political” ideas but a fundamental framework of assumptions that defines the
parameters of the real and the self; it constitutes what Althusser calls the social subject’s
“lived relation to the real”.105

The central argument of Althusser’s theory of social construction is that we are

‘interpellated’ or ‘hailed’ by ideology and we acquire our subjectivity in relation to

prevailing social definitions and categories. He comments:

In the ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a center of
initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to
a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting
his submission. The individual is interpellated as a free subject in order that he shall
submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall freely accept
his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection
“all by himself.”There are no subjects except by and for their subjection.106

104
Marx and Engles claimed in The German Ideology that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every age the
ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its
dominant intellectual force. The class which has the means of production at its disposal, has control at
the same time over the means of mental production.”(Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and
Social Philosophy, London: McGraw-Hill, 1964, p. 223.)
105
James Kavanagh, ‘Ideology’, In Frank Lentricchia & Thomas McLaughlin (eds.), Critical Terms for
Literary Study, 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 310.
106
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, p.
182.

149
He further argued that there is “no ideology except by and in an ideology: there is no

ideology except by the subject and for the subject” and that the ideology has the function

of “constituting concrete individuals as subjects”.107 Such “ideology always exists in an

apparatus and its practices. This existence is always material”.108 We are subjected to the

practices of different ideological apparatuses, and we become subjects in terms of them.

And these ideological apparatuses are what Althusser called ‘the ideological state

apparatuses’ (ISA) which includes the family, education, religion and most of the legal

procedures; and these work covertly to nurture and cajole a “submission to the rules of

established order”.109 That,

the religious ISA (the system of different Churches), the educational ISA (the system of
the different public and private “schools”), the family ISA, the legal ISA, the political ISA
(the political system, including the different Parties), the trade-union ISA, the
communication ISA (press, radio and television, etc.), the cultural ISA (Literature, the
Arts, sports, etc.).110

These ideological apparatuses function to pass the fundamental belief systems of a society

as natural and unchallengeable. It functions not only to reproduce social structures or

reproduction of submission to dominant/ruling ideology but also a reproduction of ability

to manipulate the dominant ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and

repression.111 It functions as an absolute central meaning-giving device, a higher Subject

as God or as capitalism or as nationalism and hence makes the individuals acquire their

sense of place and purpose in society. By combining Lacanian and Marxist theories

Althusser suggests that we seek in relationship to that Subject a sense of security and

validation in the ongoing human experience of fragmentation, uncontrollability, and

unpredictability. “Lacan”, Althusser writes, “demonstrates the effectiveness of the Order,

107
Ibid., p. 160.
108
Ibid., p. 155.
109
Ibid., p. 132.
110
Ibid., p. 143.
111
Ibid., pp. 132-133.

150
the Law, that has been lying in wait for each infant born since before his birth, and seizes

him before his first cry, assigning to him his place and role, and hence his fixed

destination”.112 But, for Althusser, ideology represents “not the system of real relations

which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals

to the real conditions in which they live”.113 Ideology provides the framework in which

people live their relationship to the social reality in which they are located. Ideology

forms subjects, hence what we see and hold as real, intimate and personal is nothing more

than a subject position that we hold in relation to different ideological systems.

Althusser’s theory of ideology highlighted fact that we are all informed by

ideology and subjected to different ideological systems; we are informed at an early age

by the work of these ideological apparatuses and our subjectivities are built up in our

practices of subjection. His theory helps us to understand how different spheres of our

subjectivities are defined and enacted. The ideas that society has about different things are

reproduced over and over again through the practices defined by different ideological

apparatuses. Therefore, we think in terms of gender subjectivity as feminine or masculine;

caste subjectivity as brahmin or dalit; religious subjectivity as Christian or Hindu or Islam;

national subjectivity as Indian or Pakistan; and so and so on. Althusser’s theory of

ideology is also important to think along with spatial configurations of subjectivities since

subjectivities are not abstract entities rather they are always conducted in situ. Our

subjectivities are interpellated by ideology and we become subject un-reflexively by

subjecting us to practices or interpellated through direct means – by violence or by

repression - those of “Repressive State Apparatuses” who bring the subject into

conformity with general social definitions and norms. These Repressive State Apparatuses

112
Ibid., p. 211.
113
Ibid., p. 165.

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(RSA) are “the police, the courts, the prisons; but also the army ... and above this

ensemble, the head of the State, the government and the administration”.114 But at same

time our subjectivities are also hard-won by subject knowingly through struggles and

protest which are also imbibed by certain ideologies and world-view. All of these

subjectivities are constituted, experienced and contested in the context of real life, across

languages and cultural representations; and it is done in spatial configurations where

ideology works fundamentally by means of its engagement of subjectivities.

Despite the fact that there is ideological interpellation of subjectivities, one can ask

the question, is Althusserian subject deficit of agency? Tony Davies noticed that, Lacanian

and Althusserian theory,

kicks away the twin pillars of humanism: the sovereignty of rational conscious, and the
authenticity of individual speech. I do not think, I am thought. You do not speak, you are
spoken. Thought and speech, which for the humanist had been the central substance of
identity, are located elsewhere, and the self is a vacancy ... Thus, for Althusser, the
“subject” of history is not the individual human being, speaking and acting purposefully in
a world illuminated by rational freedom, but the impersonal “structure in dominance”-
what Marx called the “forces and relations in production” that, “operate outside man and
independent of his will,” and that set the pattern and horizon of individual action.115

Similarly, Terry Eagleton also raised the “political bleakness of Althusser’s theory” and

summed up that, “for [Althusser] subjectivity itself would seem just a form of self-

incarceration; and the question of where political resistance springs from must thus remain

obscure”.116 At the same time Eagleton recognizes in Marxism and literary Criticism, the

usefulness of Althusserian notion to explore ideological structures in literary works.117

Even though one can raise criticism against Althusser for being lack of human agency for

his subject who has been interpellated by ideology, he could not be considered as defeatist

and politically deflating. As Judith Butler observes, his concept remains so compelling and

114
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other ... Op. Cit.,, p. 137.
115
Tony Davies, Humanism, London: Routledge, 1977, p. 60.
116
Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An introduction, London: Verso, 1991, pp. 145-146.
117
Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, p. 19.

152
lends itself to practical critical interpretation, both of cultural processes and of literary

texts. Since it enables such critical interpretations, make a case for a manifestation of the

political resistance. She argues that Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” should be

considered “exemplary and allegorical”, and that our conscription in and through that

concept is always partial and open to challenge: “we might reread ‘being’ as precisely the

potentiality that remains unexhausted by any particular interpellation”.118 And from the

recognition of this seductive power of interpellation derives the possibility of critique and

other forms of agency.

Althusser’s theory of ideological interpellation of subject is conceptually useful to

understand how human subjects are intepellated by set of practices and representations.

For Althusser, the subject who is a subject in ideology cannot recognise herself/himself

within ideology (or the working of ideology) since living in a system allowed for a sense

that everything is alright. But it would not be true always as Althusser conceptualised. We

experience everything in the real moments of life; life provides us with a critical entrance

into theorising subjectivity. Subjectivity renders to be a product and process of practices;

and also a life experience. One could experience it as multiple subjects – class, gender,

race, etc. Teresa De Lauretis argues that the critical study of the ideology of gender

produces a subject who is aware of the working of ideology. Therefore, the ideological

interpellation of subject is not merely without their knowledge. She further argues that the

subject “within feminism is one that is at the same time inside and outside the ideology of

gender, and conscious of being so, conscious of that two-fold pull, of that division, of that

doubled vision”.119 It means that there is interplay between ideology and reality in an

118
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997, pp. 106, 131.
119
Teresa De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 10.

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interactive way. Ideology interpellates subjectivity in place and space that are constituted.

To say further the place and space we inhabit produce us; moreover, our subjectivities also

get configured across space and places that are constituted by us.

Elspeth Probyn in her essay ‘Spatial Imperative of Subjectivity’ observes that there

is an absolute spatial nature in the processes of producing subjectivity and at the same time

there is ideological interpellation: Space informs, limits and produces our subjectivity.

Equally, subjectivity is connected with space, and it rearticulates certain historical

definitions of space.120 In this sense, neither space nor subjectivity is free-floating: they are

mutually interdependent and complexly structured entities. There is also ideological

underpinning in all forms of social construction of subjectivities including the

subjectivities constructed through contestation, struggles, protest and other kind of third

space practice. The spatiality of different kinds based on different practices cannot be

thoroughly understood without a conceptual explication of subjectivity of the emplaced

subject who constitute and reconstitute spatiality. Therefore, we have attempted to explain

the theories of subjectivities by Foucault, Lacan and Althusser. We would be conceiving a

‘post-humanistic perspective of subjectivity’ in our model ‘spatial complexes’.

To sum up, this chapter has two important sections: the first one is the third space

theories of Edward Soja, Homi Bhabha and others. It conceived human existence

inherently as spatial which is multiple and plural therefore affirmed the need of multiple

conceptions beyond dualism. Moreover, it identified all kind of practices within the

purview of spatiality that are not necessarily economic practices; and thirdspace is both

mode of existence and methodology. Soja has advanced his Thirdspace methodology

through what he calls as ‘new cultural politics’ for a critical postmodernism where

120
Elspeth Probyn, ‘The Spatial Imperative of Subjectivity’, In Kay Anderson, et.all. (eds.), Handbook of
Cultural Geography, London: Sage Publication, 2003, pp. 297-298.

154
‘spatial turn’ is very significant and in which all practices, identity concerns, social

movements etc are accommodated. Soja uses Thirdspace to open up and expand the scope

of the imagination about the spatiality of life, a dimension as significant as historicality

and sociality. This Thirdspace is mode of existence in the form of peripheral marginality

and also opening up of new spaces in the form of resistance, struggle and social

movements. It is also a methodology for exploring the spatiality of social life

transcending binary conceptions for new constellations and configuration of existence.

Soja has developed and used spatial concepts of synekism, fractals and archipelago to

explain hegemonic practices within spatiality. Synekism is nucleated and hierarchically

nested process of domination; fractals is practices combining and ordering complex and

varied sites in more interactive and appealing manner by hiding the complexity and

diversity. Archipelago is spatial hegemony through built environment, through

architectural design, technological surveillance, gated communities, and gaze of the

private police, walled-in-shopping malls (“mall-as-panopticon-prison with fence

fortification) and other fortified spatial form acting as space police is vital part of the

spatial practices in every society. The term third space has acquired prominence through

post-colonial theoretician Homi Bhahba, who addresses the notion of identity. Third

space is where we negotiate identity, where identity is constructed and re-constructed,

where life in all its ambiguity is played out. This notion of ‘third space’ serves as a

rebuttal or corrective to the binary conceptions of modernist thinking by highlighting new

ways of seeing the lived reality. Bhabha’s conception of space as enunciative political act

and as hybrid cultural position fore-grounded space as the primary category to define

what is being social. Therefore, thirdspace theories try to detonate and deconstruct the

conventional ways of thinking spatiality and by opening up new possibilities for

accounting heterogeneous, diverse, marginal and multiple conceptions of spatial practices

155
and define what is being social based on spatiality of existence. Moreover, third space

theories are not only fore-grounded space to conceive sociality and multiple spatiality but

also problematic of spatial subjectivity in an afresh mode of thinking.

The second section is about spatial subjectivity and its link to spatiality of social

life. The conception of spatial imperative of subjectivity is very significant in the

theorization of space/society, the spatiality. Space is social relation and social construction

in which subjects are emplaced; and at the same time there is constitutive role of space in

the construction of individual subjectivities and social identities. Social relation and the

emplaced subject in such relation is a central theoretical moment in the spatializing of

social life since space is produced by social relations (subjectivities) and such relation

reproduces, mediates and transforms space, the social relation and society. Therefore,

there is socio-spatial dialectic that a dialectical interchanges of social relations and space

and is open towards the reformulation of each since there is subject. Space and subjectivity

have dialectical relationship. Subjectivity is laborious, continually contestable and

affirmable factor for living in the world. It is intertwined with spatiality of social life. In

relation to such ‘spatial imperative of subjectivity’ that no spatiality without subject and

no subject without spatiality, we have explored Foucault’s discourse analysis of

subjectivity, Jacques Lacan’s theory of subjectivity as symbolic effect and Louis

Althusser’s conception of ideological interpellation of subject, the process by which we

acquire our social identities. Both Foucault and Lacan understood subjectivity within

spatial discourse both discursive and non-discursive (of audibility and visibility) and

representations. Foucauldian subject is emplaced in every ‘site’ of spatiality either as

submissive to spatial discourse of power or as political act of liberating through thrashing

the power to reconstitute spatiality. For Lacan, subject is an effect of linguistic and

symbolic horizons, the cultural giving of one’s own being; and there is developmental

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relation between human bodies and space, i.e. spaio-cultural realms are significant in the

constitution human subjectivity. Subject becomes an acting subject through linguistic

signifiers available in spatio-cultural terrains of social life that symbolic horizons endow

subjectivities on subject to act and live. Althusser poses ideology against science and

assigns it a relative autonomy; and for him ideology is overdetermined within the wider

structural context of social formation; and different hegemonic ideological apparatuses

interpellate subject in to sociality; but such interpellation is not fully without the

knowledge of subject as Althusser conceived. In short, all these conceptions of

subjectivity would render different visibilities and dimensions in the understanding of

subjectivity and spatiality of social life. Now we are moving to the next chapter that

envisages spatiality as ‘spatial complexes’ integrating different aspects in the spatial

practices.

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