Spatial Formations

country’. It is about space and time and the way we continually reconstruct reality through communicative action and presentation. This review is caught in the approach of the book and the net it attempts to weave. Thus it is essayistic in its style, speculative in its approach, tentative in its conclusions and hesitant in its judgment, leaving options open in anticipation of further readings into time and space. Spatial Formations is a collection of extended essays representing the author’s long-standing endeavours to integrate space into social theory. These essays are an attempt to develop a non-representational, nonfunctional framework which eschews the usual abstractions from reality. The torchbearers during these forays into reality are philosophers and writers all of which in one way or other equate our sense of the real with practice through communication. Among those taking pride of place are Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Castoriadis and Shotter. This parentage leads the author to question ‘the systematic spirit of the Enlightenment’ which has governed Western thinking and science since the Renaissance. ‘I have tried to move away from the kind of abstract theory which washes away content by ignoring context, leaving only empty panoptic visions.’ A new theory of society is proposed which is anchored in a ‘network of practices’ embodying both space and time. It is practice which constitutes our sense of the real. Context is itself seen as an agent within the network of practices, and time honoured distinctions between subject and object, man and machine, society and nature, public and private begin to disappear. The book is structured in two parts: Earlier... and Later..., prefaced by an introductory chapter on the Meaning, Use and Style of Non-respresentational Theories. Each part has its own introduction exposing the central ideas and concepts to follow. The author considers these ideas as ‘pretheoretical’ in the sense that they point in directions of theorising rather than setting out fully fledged theoretical structures. Central to the Earlier... part is a discussion and critique of Giddens structuration theory. Thus Chapter 2 focuses specifically on the determination of social action and the problem of structure within the context of Marxism and structuration theory. Chapter 3 deals with knowledge and how it is historically constructed and diffused in space, whilst Chapter 4 is concerned with the human agent, how people build themselves through discourse with others and how political attitudes towards the left have changed in England during the Second World War. In the Later... part of the book the theoretical notions set out in Chapter 1 are applied to a number of socio-historical settings, each in turn with an emphasis on time, money and machines. Chapter 5, continuing the elaboration of time and space, develops a new consciousness based on Shotter and Law (dismissing Thompson in the process) and shows that language and ideology play a key role in the cultural understanding of time. A case study of time consciousness in Mediaeval England is 146 Capital & Class #64