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Spatial Form and the Pathologies of Public Reason:

Toward a Critical Theory of Space*

by

Michael J. Thompson

Dept. Political Science

William Paterson University

thompsonmi@wpunj.edu

1. Introduction

At the heart of critical theory is the examination of forms of consciousness and their relation to

the social structures patterned by administrative-capitalist logics. The pathologies that plague

mass societies are seen to be expressions of specific forms of life that lead to alienated or reified

forms of consciousness which actively distract subjects from a critical confrontation with the

constellations of power that constitute their social world. Underlying this research program was

a tacit acceptance of a causal relation between the social-structural domain of human life – of

economic logics, of the imperatives of rationalized institutions, and so on – on the one hand and

the content of subjective mental states, powers of cognition, experience, the “lifeworld,” on the

other. This was at the heart of what we could call the classical paradigm of critical theory where

Marxian insights of political economy, in one form or the other, were accepted as a basis from

which to theorize the pathologies of consciousness. But this has been gradually displaced by

currents in contemporary critical theory which has advocated the thesis that the basis of an

emancipatory consciousness and praxis lies hidden within the rhythms of everyday life. Whether

this is seen to be the structures of language and communication and everyday speech acts, or the

intersubjective and recognitive relations that lead to a critical awareness of social injustices, the

dominant approach that has concerned these theorists and their followers has been a pragmatist-

* Forthcoming in James Glass and Diana Boros (eds.) Theorizing Public Space: The Frankfurt School and Beyond.

(New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014).

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inspired critique of Marxist and Idealist ideas that predominated the classical paradigm of critical

theory. This earlier paradigm, it is generally argued, relegated its attention to the problems of the

relation between the structural and institutional dimensions of modern society and the

consciousness and personality system of individuals but at the expense of the ways that spheres

of action are in fact autonomous from the clenches of economic structure and function.

But what should still be seen as salient and compelling about the earlier paradigm of

critical theory that informed the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Marcuse, and others, was

the general thesis that modern, capitalist societies possessed a structural-functional logic that

deformed the cognitive capacities of social subjects. What constitutes it as a tradition, in its most

basic sense, is the premise that modern capitalist institutions are capable of deforming essential

critical capacities of individual subjects to the extent that they come to accept passively forms of

domination, exploitation, and dehumanization that ought to serve as the very things that would

otherwise catapult them into political action against the systems of power that constrain their

freedom. The dialectic between social structure/function and consciousness was seen as the

heart of the pathological nature of consciousness and culture within capitalist societies. Critique

could only come about when there was a rational grasp of the mechanisms that produced and

reproduced power relations – and the deformation of the cognitive powers of individuals (as well

as the personality or character systems they possessed) was what made critical theory distinctive

from the beginning.

Although this is a brief description of what could be seen as a division between an older,

classical critical theory and its more contemporary – and in my view misguided – manifestation,

I will take it here as a methodological starting point in order to examine one aspect of society

that has been ignored by critical theorists: the relation between forms of social space and forms

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of consciousness. My thesis here is that there are specific properties to socio-spatial structures

that are central in disabling the requisite cognitive, epistemic, and moral-evaluative capacities

that serve to underwrite what has become the central paradigm of contemporary, neo-Idealist

critical theory: the action-theoretic paradigm that has become the hallmark of thinkers such as

Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and other proponents of discursive and intersubjective forms of

reason that are seen as the central mechanism of critique. As I see it, the paradigmatic shift that

has been made and cemented through the work of Habermas and Honneth, among others, and

which places emphasis on the communicative and pragmatist understanding of human rationality

as an ethical and political force, is deeply problematic. As I see it, public space – indeed, social

space in general – must be seen as a dimension of the various processes of socialization, one that

can either inhibit or to some extent retard the consciousness of individuals. This is because

space and society are dialectically related to such an extent that they can be conceived as a

distinct dimension of processes of socialization. What I will here call socio-spatial structures

are themselves rooted in logics of capital and its imperative for accumulation as well as the

degrees of rationalization required by administrative-bureaucratic forms of economic

management. In addition, forms of social inequality – of class, race, and gender – are themselves

spatially embedded in space to such an extent that particular forms of socialization result. The

produces a series of structural and functional logics in various institutional and cultural life that

comes to have a deep effect on the processes of socialization that in turn have an impact on the

cognitive capacities of subjects. In this sense, socio-spatial form becomes a variable that itself

affects the kinds of socialization processes that deeply mark the lifeworld of individuals. More

particularly, I want to show how socio-spatial form can inhibit critical consciousness and limit

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the effectiveness of discursive and intersubjective approaches and show the limits of current

manifestations of critical theory.

Central to my approach are the ways in which spatial formations are able to guide and

routinize specific kinds of social relations which, in turn, come to have a deep impact on the ego-

development of subjects. I take it as basic that space is therefore a crucial and central dimension

within which individuals come to be shaped and formed and their consciousness developed. The

argument I will explore here is that social-spatial structures are deeply constitutive of the

cognitive capacities of subjects and that this is constitutes one of the barriers to critical

consciousness in modern societies. Through its ability to shape and organize forms of

socialization, spatial structures of everyday life should be seen as central to any critical theory of

society. The thesis I seek to defend here is that capitalist forms of economic life articulate socio-

spatial structures and forms of everyday life that come to cause deep pathologies in

communicative reason and intersubjective patterns that themselves call into question the

supposed power of these approaches. The effect of spatial form on the development of

consciousness goes beyond the mere ways that people come to think about their world, it also

undermines those capacities that thinkers such as Habermas and Honneth have come to see as

basic to the social nature of social beings. Contemporary capitalist societies have seen the

withering away of public space – at least public space that has been capable of sustaining and

cultivating a viable democratic culture. Quite to the contrary, the privatization of public space,

its colonization by market forces and imperatives, and the increasing class and racial-ethnic

divisions in social space more generally have had a deep impact on the ways that space is able to

shape social interaction, forms of socialization and, more centrally, the consciousness of

individuals themselves. In the end, a critical theory of space can open up for us the complex

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connection between the structural and material forms of life, the social practices to which they

give rise, the forms of consciousness that are produced by them, and, in the end, the forms of

social power that are produced and reproduced as a result. This will be my project in what

follows.

2. Public Space and Public Sphere

First, it is necessary to clarify some basic problems with the way the contemporary critical theory

has dealt with the problem of rationality and consciousness. The relation between public space

and public sphere is essential, but generally overlooked in the critical theory literature. The basic

thrust of my thesis here is that there is a basic, fundamental connection between the socio-spatial

realm that emphasizes the ways that human relations and behavior patterns are structured by

spatial factors on the one hand and the styles and capacities for reasoning (epistemic and

normative) that subjects are capable of. Put another way, the kinds of capacities for reasoning,

for intersubjective, communicative and recognitive theories to cohere, are deeply shaped and

affected by the socio-spatial sphere of life. It governs the kinds of socialization patterns and

subjective dimensions of the life-world that are taken as givens in contemporary, neo-Idealist

forms of Critical Theory. The critical edge of this argument will be that these schools of Critical

Theory are limited by an Idealist understanding of socialization processes which, in turn, deeply

limit their normative-philosophical arguments. The socio-spatial realm becomes, on my view,

one of the core domains of the social base that comes to affect (and to distort under conditions of

capitalism) the “superstructural” domain of thought, of belief, of value itself.

In his diagnosis of the collapse of the bourgeois public sphere over the course of the

twentieth century, Habermas argues that its disintegration was effected by the shift from a

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critical public sphere shaped by a free exchange of ideas through a vibrant literary public to a

society dominated by the commodification of journalism and the rise of a consumptive-based

media that shifted attention away from the older political functions of the public sphere. This

transition was seen to be the result of the transformation of the nature of the literary public and

literary production falling victim to a commodified standardization. The modern, hollowed out

public sphere of radio, television, and mass market reading public was not able to formulate the

kinds of subjects that had once been able to relate to the political dimensions of their world.

“The world fashioned by the mass media,” writes Habermas, “is a public sphere in appearance

only. . . . In the course of the eighteenth century, the bourgeois reading public was able to

cultivate in the intimate exchange of letters (as well as in the reading of the literature of

psychological novels and novellas engendered by it) a subjectivity capable of relating to

literature and oriented toward a public sphere” (Habermas, 1989: 171). Habermas was able to

perceive this crucial shift away from a politicized public sphere and toward an anemic and

apolitical form of public discourse, one which “certainly fulfills important social-psychological

functions, especially that of a tranquilizing substitute for action; however, it increasingly loses its

publicist function” (Habermas, 1989: 164).

The dialectic of subjectivity and publicity is a central theme in the constitution of the

critical public sphere. The problem that Habermas came to see pessimistically in his earlier work

was overcome through a theoretical project where communication would come to serve as the

very basis of a democratic political theory rooted in the social-theoretic insights of linguistically

constituted forms of ego- and will-formation. It was through the expansion of discursive forms

of practice and the embedding of discursive procedures within the institutions of society that

democratic forms of life would come to challenge encrusted forms of authority giving life to the

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emancipatory interest of individuals that traditional Critical Theory has been, in his view, unable

to articulate. Communicative action was a theoretical model built on an intersubjective structure

which presupposed the capacity of individuals to exercise a critical form of reasoning which was

itself embedded within the structure of language. But in so doing, Habermas and those that have

continued to work within this paradigm, have placed greater and greater emphasis on the sphere

of social action at the expense of the structural-functional logics of social power, i.e., of

capitalism itself (Thompson, 2011).

However, what I would like to argue here is that these theoretical assumptions take us too

far away from what we can call here socialization- and rationalization-pathologies that pervade

modern capitalist societies. Misshapen public spheres are therefore those social and cultural

forms of life that frustrate even seal off the potentiality of individuals to become socialized in in

order to fulfill the rational and critical capacities of modern subjectivity. Indeed, for Habermas

this was the core feature of modernity: that individuation would arise from social forms that were

marked by a new functions of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization

(Habermas, 1987: 336ff). The public sphere is all too often conceived as a spaceless dimension,

an abstract entity, a field of practices rather than an actual physical space. Sometimes this is the

case, as when we see the public sphere as the interchange of letters, books, essays, newspapers,

and the like. However, at another level, it is also the actual spaces where social intercourse takes

place: the spaces where informal discussion and debate can occur such as in town squares, cafes,

literary clubs and societies, and so on.

The relation between public space and our general conceptions of public spheres needs to

be called into question. We can no longer sustain the view that a separation exists between the

cognitive and epistemic capacities of individuals and the socio-spatial context within which they

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live and are socialized. Anything seeking to call itself a “critical theory” of society must resist

the strong temptations that guide and orient the contemporary approaches to this discipline.

What I will propose here is an outline for a critical theory of space: a theory of spatial forms and

their impact on social relations and self-formation and cognition which serves as a barrier to the

communicative and recognitive models of socialization that currently dominates critical theory.

3. Socio-Spatial Form and Consciousness

Space is structured, it does not simply exist as emptiness. It contains and structures social

relations even as social relations help constitute and structure space (Soja, 1982). It cannot be

taken for granted since this relation between space and social relations and structure are central

to the kinds of socialization processes that help form subjective mental states and personality

structures. Space is social to the extent that shapes the lived environment of any community. In

early human societies, this was marked more by the natural contours of geography. Mountains,

seas, rivers, and lakes would serve as boundaries forcing certain kinds of interaction, prohibiting

others. In other places, these barriers would be exploited as means of social interaction and

trade. But any spatial structure possess its own concrete set of structures and sub-structures with

different sets and subsets of rules, constraints, and forms. We can view space in purely material

terms, but it is more useful to see it as dialectically related to social life itself. All social

relations occur within a specific time-space continuum which structures with whom we interact,

how we interact with them, and, through the course of time, it can routinize these interactions to

such an extent that they can become reflected into the mental life of individuals. Therefore,

space and society ought to be conceived as a composite variable, as a socio-spatial dimension

which itself exists alongside time as two central dimensions of socialization.1 A critical theory

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of space, as I see it, therefore needs to show how the socio-spatial dimension, acting through

time, can come to shape and affect the forms of consciousness of individuals.

3.1. Structural Characteristics of Social Space

The structural logic of any space can be seen to orient individual and collective behavior. If I am

teaching a class, this class exists in a building. The structure of the building exerts its own rules

and logic over me: to leave the building I must follow its hallways and doorways to the outside;

to get to another place, I am forced to subject myself to the design and the rule-governed

structure of that space. This is a simple example, but nevertheless illustrative of a kind of

grammar of space that can be developed. What concerns me here, however, is the various ways

that the logics of spatial form and structure come to have a formative impact on the

consciousness of individuals; how their cognitive, evaluative, and affective powers and

capacities can be shaped by spatial form and structure. We can therefore begin to build a critical

theory of space by isolating the properties of spatial structures that shape the processes of

cognitive development and socialization and intersubjective activities that accompany them.

Since all social activities are in some basic sense embedded in space, all social relations

have a spatial dimension. This constitutes perhaps the first, most crucial feature of the socio-

spatial dimension. Certain features are unique to the material or concrete features of space, such

as the actual material structures of spatial design that can constrain or enable certain forms of

interaction, and so on. But even these material features become relevant only to the extent that

they are able to shape the associational life of individuals with one another – a crucial first step

in constructing a more general theory of socio-spatial structure and its impact on the production

of consciousness and, in the end, the order of social power. There are four key features of spatial

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structures that should be pointed out for their power to shape social relations. They include:

distanciation, isolation, containment, and boundedness. Each of these features refers to the

extent to which intersubjective relations are regulated and organized. Individuals’ relations with

others can be either frustrated or permitted with varying degrees of intensity based on the extent

to which there exists a high degree of distance between two individuals or groups. But also

mutual isolation can result without distance, as when social networks of relations are separate

from one another, thereby isolating participants from interaction. Containment occurs when

there exist material or other structural limits on relations with others, and it is usually imposed by

a specific form of hierarchical order that seeks to partition groups in different spaces. This

finally gives rise to boundedness of social relations and networks, where groups become highly

involuted through their lack of exposure and interaction to other groups – whether in terms of

class, race, gender, or whatever. These features therefore refer to the kinds of structures that

exist in the socio-spatial dimension. They are themselves expressions of social power: as when

ghettoes are constructed to contain a particular community which can then lead to isolation of a

specific group from another which in turn leads to a boundedness to their social relations and

networks with others. Spatial forms can be grouped into two broad categories, open and closed

structures (Thompson, 2009a) based on the extent to which these four features are present. Open

structures register low levels of distanciation, isolation, containment and boundedness. They

promote interaction between individuals and groups, emphasize equal as opposed to hierarchical

relational forms, and seek to have more fluid social networks. Closed structures are the opposite

in that they register higher levels of the opposite characteristics. They segregate individuals and

groups, frustrate interpersonal contact, and involute social networks and relations.

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Social spaces are therefore not simply places in the geographic sense, as when we look at

the difference between a public space and a private space. These different geographic and

architectural expressions of space are powerful means of shaping social relations (Urry, 1981;

Jacobs, 1961) as well as the mental states of individuals (cf. Downs, 1970), but we should also

include those spaces that are not purely geographic but are also spatial in the sense that they have

the power to impose distance (in terms of separateness), isolation, containment, and

boundedness. The family, in particular the bourgeois, nuclear family, is one example of this kind

of socio-spatial form in that it imposes some distance from other families and individuals,

isolates, to a greater or lesser extent, its members from other relational spaces, is contained and

promotes a boundedness of relational networks. Of course, we can go on to add schools, the

workplace, the neighborhood or community one lives in, the workplace, and so on.2 The extent

to which these different spheres overlap is not of great interest here. What is important is how

these different social spaces are able to direct and structure social relations since these are the

real mechanism of subject- and self-formation in that they constitute distinct, albeit many times

interconnecting, environments and patterns of organization (cf. Sorre, 1957). Hence, socio-

spatial forms are characterized by their ability to structure social relations and practices. The

spatial element of social relations is crucial, in my view, because it is the structural dimension

that affects intersubjective life and, over time, shapes subjective consciousness and cognitive

styles of thought and personality structures as well.

If we take the four basic socio-spatial categories I outlined above, we can see that they

are all crucial in shaping structures of social relations. What social space is able to do through

the degrees of intensity of the parameters of distanciation, isolation, containment, and

boundedness is form socio-spatial structures that guide and, in a certain sense, determine social

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life. It is not only through the symbolic ordering of space that a social order maintains

coherence, it is also, and probably more importantly, through the structural grammar of space

that social life obtains a reified existence in that our practices and consciousness (I will discuss

this below) become routinized by these socio-spatial structures and begin to reify our

consciousness about the nature of social relations. Hence, when Bourdieu writes “the reason

why submission to the collective rhythms is so rigorously demanded is that the temporal forms

or the spatial structures structure not only the group’s representation of the world, but the group

itself,” (Bourdieu, 1977: 163; cf. Bourdieu, 1985) we can respond perhaps by saying that the

spatial structures that constitute social life are themselves not only submitted to, but they in fact

socialize subjects at a basic praxic and cognitive level. Social power can therefore be something

routinized by socio-spatial form: the structure of the family, the isolation of different social

groups and their containment, as well as the boundedness of the social networks and

homogeneity of inter-personal relations in everyday life – all can work to reify concepts about

the social world. There is, on this view, a fundamental determining quality to the forms of social

space that we inhabit and which socialize us.

In this sense, I am emphasizing the micro-spatial forms that shape praxis over the macro-

social forms that thinkers such as Harvey (1987, 2006) outline and which themselves shape those

micro-forms of interaction and behavior. For Harvey, it is the command over space and time,

“the ability to control the material context of personal and social experience” (Harvey, 1987:

227) that is of importance. But the question of how socio-spatial structures are able to do this is

not always an explicit intention of elites; it is also, and I would say more generally, the

consequence of the commodification of space and social relations. The problem that I think is of

importance here is the ways in which spatial form comes to hinder the critical capacities of

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subjects and also reifies the social forms, relations and practices within a broader gnoseological

order, one that becomes the very glue for hierarchical, rationalized patterns of social behavior.

The distanciation, isolation, containment, and boundedness of different social spaces and their

relations with other social spaces (families, schools, neighborhoods, shopping malls, and so on)

all come to structure social relations in routinized, patterned, rationalized ways leading to

specific formulations of social power.

3.2. Cognition, World-View, and Personality

If this thesis about the features of socio-spatial forms is tenable, it rests on the fact that social

spaces have an ability to structure other structures within social and personal life. To this end,

the next level to explore is the social-relational domain that is itself shaped by the socio-spatial

domain. These are, as I have noted above, dialectically constituted, but they can be analytically

dissected in order to derive a theory of the pathologies of ego- and self-formation characteristic

of reified forms of cognition. The features of socio-spatial forms outlined above are intended to

map not only features of actual space, but more importantly the capacity of socio-spatial

structures to themselves structure social relations and forms of praxis. This means that the

routinization of socio-spatial structures come to routinize networks of knowledge, of relations,

and as these processes act through the dimension of time, they come to also structure the

normative and cognitive structures of judging and thinking of subjects. Goffman’s insight about

the nature of social relations is a first approximation for this theory: “The dealings that any set of

actors routinely have with one another and with specified classes of objects seem universally to

become subject to ground rules of a restrictive and enabling kind. When persons engage in

regulated dealings with each other, they come to employ social routines or practices, namely

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patterned adaptations to the rules. . . . These variously motivated and variously functioning

patterns of actual behavior, these routines associated with ground rules, together constitute what

might be called a ‘social order’” (Goffman, 1971: x).

For Goffman, these “ground rules” were of a particularly micro form. They include

“conformances, by-passings, secret deviations, excusable infractions, flagrant violations, and the

like” (Goffman, 1971: x). But if we deepen this analysis, we find that these “ground rules”

become more like embedded logics of behavior, practice, and thought. They are embedded in

the kinds of spatial forms that structure social relations, but they also come to be embedded in

the ways that we cognize the world itself. They come to constitute the very ways that we see,

conceive, and legitimate the world around us. The routines imposed by socio-spatial structures

and their constraints are such that they not only shape basic patterns of interaction, they also

shape consciousness itself. Thus, forms of concrete social-structural power (such as class, or

gender and race) can come to partition spatial forms which then come to shape social relations

and, finally, consciousness as well (cf. Gilmore, 1977; Downs, 1970; Gale and Golledge, 1982;

Tonboe, 1986; Thompson, 2012). Social power is shot through the structural conditions of life

and the subjective, interior nature of subjects. Consider as a basic model the relation between

three different layers of consciousness of others: interpersonal, reflexive, and public. Rather

than see each of these simply as scales of interaction, I want to suggest that they are “epistemic

frames” as well as forms of interaction. In other words, these forms of relation also have crucial

epistemological consequences on the subject and the formation of his consciousness and ways of

thinking (normative and descriptive) about the nature of the social world. Using Goffman again,

we can see these as “frames” that organize the experience of subjects. For Goffman, a social

frame “allows its user to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of

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concrete occurrences defined in its terms. He is likely to be unaware of such organized features

as the framework has and unable to describe the framework with any completeness” (Goffman,

1974: 21).3

Within the interpersonal frame, we come to awareness of immediate others. This

consciousness of their existence is also accompanied by a learning process of interaction norms,

but they are also the conduit through which the individual comes to be exposed to specific

categories of thought as well as value-orientations and other kinds of norms that are reinforced

through a basic ego-alter relationship. But this also constitutes in itself an initial (and over time,

somewhat stable) epistemic frame that is routinized by associated practices. Hence, a child

learns that certain inter-personal frames should be associated with specific practices, such as

when dealing with one’s mother, a friend, a “stranger,” and so on. The nature of these inter-

personal encounters are not spontaneous, but are shaped by social scripts which are themselves

social-structural in nature: parents are treated differently then friends, teachers, and so on.

What results from interpersonal epistemic frames is a kind of “cognitive mapping,” not

only of abstract norms, values, and practices, but the spatial structuring of these social relations

themselves shape and constrain the social-relational horizon that any subject encounters.

Interpersonal consciousness therefore can serve as a kind of basic ground from which other,

more complex forms of consciousness can be derived. Reflexive consciousness is the next

epistemic frame that stems from the way that the subject comes to identify himself as a subject in

relation to others. The role-expectations that are learned through the nexus of varying

interpersonal encounters can have a stable meaning only within a routinized functional system

where individuals come to “learn their place” within social hierarchies and the roles and values

associated with them. This epistemic frame, as it begins to reify itself within the cognitive

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patterns of the individual, becomes the foundation for the kinds of evaluative judgments and

normative coding that he will perform throughout his social experiences. This leads to a more

abstract form of thinking, what I call public consciousness, which is the epistemic frame that

conditions thoughts about social norms writ large: the validity of the social order one lives

within, the justification of the social system one inhabits, the rationale one subscribes to about

the workings of the world, and so on. This is the domain of ideology, or legitimacy, of the social

world itself cognized by the subject.

Figure 1: Nesting of social-epistemic frames

Now, this is important as connective tissue between social space and its various features

on the one hand and the subjectivity of subjects on the other. The thesis that underlies neo-

Idealist forms of critical theory, those that root themselves in communicative, discursive, or

recognitive models of the subject and intersubjectivity, seem, given the discussion thus far, to be

deeply problematic in that they do not grant a determining force to the social structure. But if we

Public Consciousness 

Re.lexive Consciousness 

Interpersonal Consciousness 

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see “determination” here as Marx did, namely as a means by which any structure has the

capacity to place limits on the activities of any other thing, then we can see that socio-spatial

forms exert generalizable and acute limitations and constraints upon social-relational praxis.4

The epistemic frames that one comes to be habituated into I have called a public reasoning

context (Thompson, 2009b, 2012) and this is defined as the series of social relations and forms of

interaction that become routine on a stable, regular basis in one’s life. Public reasoning contexts

can vary based on the different socio-spatial structures one inhabits: hence, urban dwellers may

be possess more open, more tolerant attitudes to certain ideas or behaviors than those that are

socialized and who live in more closed socio-spatial forms and structures. Any public reasoning

context can be defined as the extent to which social relations are characterized by heterogeneity

and levels of association with others. Public reasoning contexts cannot absolutely determining,

nothing can, but they provide the background conditions (the dialectical combination of socio-

spatial structure and epistemic frames discussed above) that come to shape not only the form but

also the content of communication and therefore of social learning and the reification of social

orders, practices, values, and so on.

In this sense, the spatial forms that structure social practices also routinize relational

structures which are in turn capable of shaping evaluative and cognitive functions. The nature of

social relations are therefore embedded in spatial forms in the sense that material structures are

able to construct and orient relational praxis, but also in a social sense in that social structures are

also embedded in spatial relations: class, race and gender can be structured spatially and

therefore lead to particular kinds of what I have called public reasoning contexts, or those

contexts of social relations that come to be regularized to such an extent that an individual

becomes used to the specific forms of reasoning and thinking which that context requires. Since

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spatial form shapes social relations, these social relations serve as the basis for the socialization

of subjects. Consider what it means to be socialized into highly segregated, contained, and

bounded community or neighborhood. The restriction of regularized communication to and

interaction with homogenous others will come to shape the attitudinal structure of the individual.

He will come to see certain people as safe, acceptable, worthy of association, and so on. He will

also begin to adopt the normative stances of those within his community and see them as

basically natural, “correct.” Finally, he will come to adopt belief systems about the world

derived from these norms. In addition, his very capacities for reasoning – his cognitive styles of

thought, his powers of logical reasoning, his command and use of language, and so on – will be

deeply shaped by these contained social relations as well. In short, socio-spatial form can come

to shape the very form and content of his personality and cognition, a gnoseological order within

the mind of the subject that organizes his experiences and understanding of the world.

Figure 2: Model of the effect of Socio-Spatial structure on normative and cognitive capacities.

Structured

Practices

Structured

Relations

Value-OrientationsCognitive Style/

Capacity

Praxiological Normative-Evaluative Gnoseological

Socio-Spatial

Structure

Structural

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Figure 2 diagrams the relation between the structural forms of socio-spatial relations and the

ways that they can structure practices that in turn shape the value-orientations and the cognitive

order of individuals. The normative-evaluative domain of subjectivity refers to the ways that

subjects normatively code their world. In regularized, familiar forms of interaction, this capacity

becomes sclerotic and dogmatic, suspicious of new moral ideas and defensive of deeply

ingrained moral habits of mind. This in turn comes to affect cognition: the ability to think

through the world rationally, critically. One’s ability to assess information, to argue, to form

logical arguments appropriate for public discourse and deliberation, becomes compromised,

tethered to the normative maps that become ingrained through closed socio-spatial structures and

their resulting socialization patterns. Hierarchical power relations that pervade these social

spaces therefore can act on subjects without friction, absorbing their mental life into a fabric of

legitimacy, one not easily called into question.

3.3. Spatial Relations, Social Power, and Domination

The routinization of social practices does not occur in a spaceless form; indeed, the design of

space is a central element for social forms of control and power (cf. Harvey 2006; Goodsell,

1988; Lofland, 1998). The gnoseological order that one comes to adopt and to which one

subscribes is generally a reified, crystallization of social power and domination only to the extent

that the relations and practices that support it have been routinized to some basic extent. The

routinization and normalization of these relational practices are, I have been arguing, largely

shaped and directed by the spatial forms of life that we inhabit. Spatial structures partition the

interactional networks and relations that come to shape cognition and personality. But the

relation of this with social power and domination comes into view once we are able to see that

20

the domination over individuals comes through the reification of the thought categories and

forms of life that subjects come to take as “natural” and legitimate. The argument I have been

exploring here is that the spatial forms we inhabit shape the social-relational context that serves

as nucleus of socialization processes that I fact routinize social relations and cognitive patterns of

thought that will serve this purpose. As a critical theory of social space, this means that the

connection between social structure and consciousness is a central pathology facing the

rationalist assumptions of contemporary political theory but also, and perhaps more importantly

here, that the theoretical bases for the intersubjectivist arguments of contemporary critical theory

also need to be called into question. What I am calling here the gnoseological realm of thought,

of thinking and knowledge of subjects means that the space of reasons within which one moves

comes to be mapped by the structure of existing social relations rather than the reverse. To be

more precise, the form of socio-spatial structures (which themselves are mappable according to

distanciation, isolation, containment, and boundedness) comes to limit and frustrate the kind of

routinized praxis and cognition that individuals come to possess. Social control and power can

therefore be exercised and amplified within society at large by reifying the social order itself,

making people accept the nature of the system as valid, as basic, and as second nature.

4. Space, Power and Pathologies of Communicative Reason

Perhaps the most immediate implication of what I have been arguing here is that the structure of

social spaces – themselves expressions of economic power and interests – are limiting factors to

the theoretical arguments of contemporary critical theory. Habermas’ thesis in The Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere, was premised on an understanding that a commercial

colonization of the public mind had occurred. That new forms of media and culture had in fact

21

reduced the capacity of the public sphere to serve as a means of critical inquiry into social and

public life. But as compelling as the argument may be, it also seems to me that there is an

element missed here and in subsequent theories of communicative rationality: namely that

economic power and control over the community takes as one of its most pervasive and

consistent forms the structure of space. This limits, as I have been arguing, the communicative

and intersubjective horizon of individuals as well as distorts the ego- and self-formation of

subjects. The relation between spatial form and cognitive and cathectic elements of subjectivity

are real and the theorized potentiality of communicative reason – pragmatic, recognitive, and so

on – lack the capacity to explode these strong forms of socialization. This means that spatial

structures, such as closed structures, create strong heteronomic tendencies within the cognitive

and cathectic personality system of the individuals socialized within them.

The spaceless assumptions of contemporary critical theory should come as little surprise.

Its neo-Idealist pretensions and its consistent attempt to eviscerate Marxism from its theoretical

apparatus has made the determining influence of structural forms essentially irrelevant. The odd

assumption remains that individuals are socialized external to the structured processes that are

themselves expressions of a capitalist social order. That the pathologies of contemporary

subjectivity and culture can be ascribed to a lack of “recognition” or some other deficit in our

intersubjective life.5 But if my thesis here is correct, then we need to see how the power

relations that are expressed through the design of spatial forms can in fact shape the powers of

subjectivity of agents. And this is significant for neo-Idealist approaches since it is a limiting

factor on the ability for the descriptive and normative features of their theories. Furthermore, it

also seems to me that this is due to a move away from the insights and theoretical vantage point

of Marxism. It is not that the theories of communication or recognition have no valid insights, it

22

is that they seek to become the basis for a critical theory of society. But the diminution of

critical culture and mindsets in advanced capitalist economies ought to be pegged to the

malformation of subjects by rationalized, hierarchical, institutional forms that predominate

modern life. The capacity for critical cognition therefore requires the structural transformation

of the economic power relations and imperatives that characterize modernity. Outside of this, we

are dealing with intellectually compelling, but politically ineffectual, theories of critique.

If socio-spatial structures shape social relations, they do this through the limiting of

communication and shaping or perhaps re-circuiting the communicative and intersubjective

relations that socialize us. The isolation of groups from one another; the boundedness of social

networks and social relations that involute one’s public reasoning contexts; the effects of

contained social spaces that allow hierarchical forms of power to become routinized in

consciousness and the social roles one adopts – all of these things are powerful countervailing

forces to the normative theories of discourse ethics and recognition. The force exerted by social

space within capitalist societies is done to limit the free, open socialization of subjects. These

insights go back at least to the building program of Haussmann in Paris and the successful

project of domesticating urban life, routinizing social control, and allowing a free space for the

development of capitalist forms of power (Harvey 2006). This domestication program was

intended to exert new forms of social control by the reshaping of socio-spatial relations. The

nineteenth-century city – due to its scale, density, and so on – was fertile ground for

communication and solidarity-formation (Lofland, 1998; Davis, 1986; Deutsch, 1961). Part of

the program of social control during the nineteenth-century was to divest urban spaces of the

sources of social disruption and this was achieved by the new forms of socio-spatial relations.

During the mid- to late- twentieth century, spatial relations were once again recast to facilitate

23

expanded production-consumption paradigms. The result of these overlapping processes has

been a wholesale transformation of space that limits communication, segregates groups, isolates

individuals, and allows social space to be colonized by the efficient imperatives of economic

interests.

The social spaces of modern urban centers are therefore characterized by large scale

commercialization, homogeneity of primary use, segregation of classes, diminished public space

used more for transgressive activities than for public debate and discourse.6 Indeed, the more

that social groups are segregated rather than integrated; the more that space can be closed off to

free, communicative forms of interaction between heterogeneous groups; the more that the very

purpose of urban space become redefined by the imperatives of economic elites, the less the

communicative-recognitive theories of contemporary critical theory have an empirical place to

occur.7 Indeed, the prime mover of these cascading structural forms is the organizational logic

of the economy: its search for profit, its need to constantly “improve” property to maximize

investment returns, and the need to open up more spaces for consumption. It is not the case that

there is some uni-causal relation between base and superstructure, but a nuanced, determining

character to the logic of economic life, its imperatives, and its capacity to shape consciousness.

But even more, this socio-spatial thesis means that the subject-forming power of space is

something deeply important for any understanding of the decline of critical consciousness and

the domestication of political radicalism. What we can call an erosion of the public mind – the

involution of thought, the atrophy of moral reasoning, the limiting of the horizons of experience,

and the privileging privacy at the expense of distinctively public forms of reasoning – can be

seen as a direct consequence of the socio-spatial forms and structures that predominate modern

societies. Atomistic, alienated forms of individualism as well as small, tightly-bounded forms of

24

group-affiliation can lead to a depletion of the content both of individuality and of publicity (cf.

Sanders, 1998; Ketcham, 1987). The transformation of consciousness that results from

routinized, ingrained habits of interaction, communication, thought and feeling in homogenized

social spaces is made even more difficult, more laborious since the social spaces that could have

served as the crucible for enlightenment, critical self-awareness, and so on, have been absorbed

into new functions of social reproduction and control. Perhaps, for this reason, critical theorists

should consider once more the centrality of the social structure of capitalism for any critical

theory of society.

Notes

25

1 Cf. this discussion with Lefebvre (1991) and Harvey (1990, 2009). The division of space they

adopt consists of “a tripartite division of material space (space as experienced through our sense

perceptions), the representation of space (space as conceived), and spaces of representation

(space as lived)” (Harvey 2009, 142).

2 De Lauwe (1960) outlines a theory of social space along similar lines, pointing to “familial

space” of the home and domestic life and interaction, “neighborhood space,” “economic space”

of work interaction, and then an “urban sector” that encompasses the larger space of interactions.

What de Lauwe does not study in any detail is how hierarchical forms of relations come to bound

social relations and, in turn, the subjective states of the individuals who are socialized by them.

3 Kögler (1997) also refers to the same element of socially situated cognition as “interpretive

schemes” which “provide organized patterns of meaning to form a third and indeed crucial

dimension of social life. This level, as least as ‘real’ as objective contexts and individual

intentions, exists in the mode of meaningful structures of tacit beliefs or symbolic assumptions

that are embodied and internalized by socially situated subjects, such as deep-seated conceptions

of society, nature, or self, on which agents draw usually without further reflection” (Kögler,

1997: 143).

4 Lofland argues on this point with respect to the built environment: “The built environment

certainly does not determine exactly how people are going to interact with one another, but it

does amplify or constrain the range of interactional possibilities” (Lofland, 1998: 181). This is

the sense of determination that is significant for the explanation of broad patterns of social

behavior in a social rather than a naturalistic sense.

5 This has been Honneth’s (1996, 2008) program of investigation which I think is deeply

problematic for any critical theory of society. Specifically, the assumption is that all forms of

social and personal pathologies can be traced to a lack of intersubjective recognition. This would

not be as problematic if it were tied to an understanding that the cause of such defects are rooted

in the structural-functional mechanisms of capitalism, although a recent paper by Deranty (2013)

attempts to resolve this aporia. In fact, the limiting factors of socio-spatial form could be seen as

one element of this limiting of intersubjectivity, but the refusal to admit the importance of social

structure’s influence on subjectivity remains a stubborn limitation to the theory of recognition.

6 Transgressive activities in cities is nothing new, but the view that this is somehow progressive

should be rejected. This lies behind Foucault’s (1987) idea of “heterotopic” versus “isotopic”

spaces. A similar, though more compelling, thesis is put forth by Kohn (2003) who focuses

more on the symbolic nature of space and its effects on a “shared conception of reality.” For

Kohn, “[t]he physical environment is political mythology realized, embodied, materialized. It

inculcates a set of enduring dispositions that incline agents to act and react in regular ways even

in the absence of any explicit rules and constraints” (Kohn, 2003: 8). The problem is that we

need to look beyond the symbolic manifestations of space and into the power of space to reify

the very categories of consciousness itself.

26

7 Lofland argues on this point “The density and small-scale segregation of the nineteenth-century

city made it . . . a particularly effective communication medium, and one singularly hospitable to

the messages of ‘outsiders.’ In contrast, the low density and automobile-scale segregation of the

typical late twentieth-century city (metropolitan Los Angeles or Phoenix, for example) make it

particularly ineffective” (Lofland, 1998: 187).

27

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