Space sickness

 

 

We’re suffering from motion sickness and curation stasis. We’re at a dagger's point where the most effective critical method - the most critical theory - is the one that produces the greatest sum of the explained. This is the basis and whole idea of hierarchical scientistic praxis.

 

Doreen Massey analysed contiguous simultaneities of praxes and directed us to engage with space as the field of discourse, rather than seek an end in discourse: “[W]hat may look to you like randomness and chaos may be someone else’s order.” This applies as much to hedge fund wealth distribution as it does to indigenous peoples making a precarious living from few resources.

Massey predicted the malaise of the 20s: “[theory] did not offer a positive alternative [..] liveliness, […] complexity and openness of the configurational itself, the positive multiplicity, which is important for an appreciation of the spatial.” Open to all happenings in the field, Massey saw the necessity of addressing non-Euclidean concepts of space and regarded that as a key adjustment to be made, to provide theoreticians, discoursers and critics access to “previously topologically improbable evocations”.

What way?

Understanding field distortions created by capitalists seeking complete control of space, Massey defines space as the entire field of discourse: “Space entails the unexpected.” To entail is, in legal terms, to limit access to finite resources to certain individuals. Entails are most often associated with long-term strategies of inheritance and wealth-limiting transfer of property rights among the aristocracy, ensuring the ownership of present resources in the future - an effective means of securing ownership of space, of space in the future, and thereby of aspects of the future, as a field of discourse, where access to finite resources is likely to be ever more contested.

Technological means for limiting or entailing access to finite resources in financial transactions provide wealth-holders, whether aristocratic, with a similar means of securing ownership of the future as that chosen by aristocrats. Wealth-holders entail resources to ensure wealth-holdings in the future, which they have already sequestered. Wealth-holders do not react and respond, as predicted and/or unexpected situations materialise. Instead, they seek redress within structures created to protect their wealth-holdings, and their holding wealth. In this sense, wealth-holders entail space, which is to say, they entail both space and the unexpected. They hedge against fate. Determinism is its own reward.

What way?

In the very big field of spatial analysis, otherwise unconnected narratives may be brought into contact and previously connected ones may be connected more distinctly, discontinuously, discretely and completely.

Space - habitus, connection, living - gives people ideas. Ideas about the future.

Simultaneity implies common wealth. What futures are you already in?