Flirting with Modernity(3)

The separation of time and space, or the rediscovery of space?

Warning: this post is not fully cooked. It is a little meandering, but I am sharing it all the same. Sometimes you need to clear the way for whatever is coming next. The overall aim of this series is to understand what modernity means and whether people are right to think it might be ending, or that we need to compost it, or hospice it, or outgrow it... I begin by wondering why I am doing that, then look at a major theorist of modernity, Anthony Giddens, who suggests ‘the separation of time and space’ is a major part of the universalising or ‘one worlding’ quality that characterises what modernity does and why it matters. I notice, however, that the Geographer Doreen Massey thinks differently, and that many of our problems arise from a lack of imagination over what space can be, and submitting too easily to space’s subordination to time. That leads me to look laterally at the metaphysics of space, and even the esoterica of space. From there, it’s a long way back to the idea of modernity, but they are related issues in my mind. I wonder if there is a connection between the role of space as a form of resistance and our apparent inability to resist the speeding up of time leading to collapse. It’s one of those posts that jumps around a lot and never quite lands, but I don’t currently have time to edit it into a more presentable state. Thanks for your understanding. The writerly life means sometimes you have to answer the front door in your pyjamas…

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I keep asking myself why I am bothering with this inquiry into modernity. I fear I may be complicit in a perennial promise that never quite delivers. I wonder if I have become the host of a banquet for words, who sit down next to other words, where authors are toasted, ideas start to schmooze, concepts get up and dance, but everyone goes home alone.

Perhaps I should set aside all this heady stuff, ever yielding to the mind’s compulsions? I am told I should BREATHE, and get back into the body. It’s not clear what happens next, and I’m not supposed to ask. But I have completed this epic quest enough to know there is a there there. And from there, I could perhaps live a different life. I’ve always wanted to plant a million trees without attaching to results. Though, in truth, I would secretly plan to climb to the top of my favourite one decades later, to watch a final sunset before I pop my clogs. It may also be past time to redirect my will to a new practice discipline, learning how to put the mind in the heart. I feel in my heart, as I write, that I should learn to do that. If you see me, remind me please.

For now, I make do with daily meditation and periodic trips to the sauna. I’m also lifting weights, though, alas, not very heavy ones. And I write.

By all means, bake saffron bread, rearrange your garden gnome collection, or learn to play the banjo instead. Do whatever is called for to keep you sane; we all must ground ourselves in whatever practices help resist our phenomenal worlds being severed from our local embodied lives. At the moment, in the middle of my life, figuring out what modernity means and whether it is ending seems to be a way to keep the gales of fate at bay; it is the equivalent of bending down to fill the sandbags on the edges of my tent on Porthemor beach in Cornwall, to prevent it from flying away.

Anthony Giddens describes ‘modernity’ as the world-historical impact of the gradual severing from tradition in post-feudal Europe, through the institutional expression of industrialism, capitalism, surveillance, ‘total war’, and the nation state, all of which are discontinuous with the pre-modern world. He calls modernity “a runaway world” and in The Consequences of Modernity (1990), he uses the metaphor of a juggernaut.

Juggernaut, from Marvel comics.

Modernity is a juggernaut. It is not just a juggernaut, but one which we can to some extent steer. However, it is a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively, we can steer only to a limited degree.

In a subsequent summary in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), Giddens highlights three things the juggernaut does to the world through what he calls its “universalising properties that explain the expansionist, coruscating nature of modern social life”. These are the separation of space and time, the disembedding of experience and institutional reflexivity. One way (and only one way) of asking if modernity is ending is to consider whether the nature and intensification of these processes point towards their demise. (*I planned to do all three here, but the first one took me on a detour, so I’ll get back to the others next time.)

First, the juggernaut separates time and space by de-situating their relationship from particular places. There was once a time for things, but then the time arrived, through the normalisation of calendars and the spread of the mechanical clock. Practices were de-localised and universalised, and the question of what ‘the future’ might bring loomed larger as the operative question. Once we only bought bread at the market on market day, but then when and where ceased to be co-extensive. In The Condition of Postmodernity(1989) David Harvey offers a variation on this point by arguing that modernity accelerates time while shrinking space, and this chimes to some extent with arguments of Paul Virilio in Speed and Politics (1977) that speed is the defining feature of modernity that serves to kill all forms of depth (ultimately a spatial metaphor), and it anticipates Castells in The Rise of the Network Society (1996) and Bauman’s Liquid Modernity(2000) where spaces have turned fluid, sublimated into network flows. In this respect, time and space are increasingly severed to the extent that we might say our technology tames space, and denatures time to a shallow present.

And yet, not so fast! As a discipline, Geography sees things differently, and Doreen Massey’s work, for instance, For Space(2005) critiques the notion that modernity separates space and time. She contends that we have needlessly accepted space as being inert and passive, rather than seeing it for the relational, dynamic, co-constructed phenomena it is. Her concern is not to over-romanticise places, but not to surrender the human capacity to use space in ways that shape or resist time. I risk veering off topic here, but I can’t help but think of Einstein’s conception of spacetime in physics, in which time and space are neither entities nor separate entities, and time is even influenced by space, gravity and motion. In each case, what is being resisted is the subordination of space to time.

Chapter twenty-four of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things sheds some light on the enigma of space. While the connection to modernity is oblique, Iain writes about modernity as such towards the end of The Master and His Emissary, and I know that it is often his implicit target. Take the following vintage McGilchrist paragraph (p997 of hardback, references removed):

‘It is interesting that in some mythologies, Time appears as a god, a mythic person of sorts’, observes Jan Zwicky, ‘but, to the best of my knowledge, space is never so represented.’ Time speaks profoundly to the human condition in a way that space, however fundamental it might be, simply does not. Time is relentless, like another being’s will, where space is pliable and may be fashioned, though not without limits, to our own. Time is emotive; space is bland. Time is always single. ‘I venture to say only one true integer may occur in all of physics’, says physicist David Tong. ‘The laws of physics refer to one dimension of time. Without precisely one dimension of time, physics appears to become inconsistent.’ By contrast space is multiple: it has between three and eleven or even more dimensions, depending on whose theory you are inclined to embrace. Time is irreversible: space open to endless revision. Time creates and corrodes: space lends (temporary) permanence to what is. Writing, for example, was invented to give permanence in space to the fleetingness of thought. Consciousness exists in time, but not in space. For elements that are often conflated, their qualities could hardly be more different.

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I read this rich and beautiful paragraph as a provocation. The line “consciousness exists in time, but not in space” builds on work by Colin McGinn, and feels mind-blowing, but is it entirely right? To put it another way, while consciousness may not exist in space, can consciousness exist as entirely a-spatial, without space, and all that this means for extension, depth, and resistance? As for mythology, I take the point, but aren’t ghosts space-subverting phenomena? When I see ouija board summonings in horror movies, I always feel it’s about accessing spatial dimensions that are otherwise off limits. And can anything with an enigmatically multiple number of dimensions be thought of as bland? And places speak profoundly to the human condition; while places are full of memory and not merely spaces, their aesthetics are inextricably shaped by space. And yes, space may be pliable, but it is also critical to resistance, which is essential to creativity. Later in the same chapter (p1021-22 of hardback) Iain suggests:

“Matter is whatever occupies space and has mass. Or rather, “exists spatially”, since space should not be thought of as a container for ‘things’. But it must have mass. And what is mass? Fascinatingly, mass is the tendency of an entity to resist - changes in course or speed. This should resonate, since, from a purely metaphysical point of view, I have been arguing that, though flow is generative, nothing comes into existence except by means of resistance to flow. The recalcitrance of mass gives rise to the possibility of enduring form."

Again, beautiful, but again I am left with so many questions. If a defining feature of space is mass, and mass is critical to the resistance to flow, and nothing comes into existence except through resistance to flow, does this not make space a contender for being the unsuspected metaphysical hero at the beating heart of creation?

Later in chapter 24, Iain explores depth, which is, of course, a spatial metaphor. To be clear, I am not saying that Iain is unappreciative of space; if anything, the opposite, indicated for instance in his quoting of the Tao te Ching on page 1005:

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,

but the empty space between them

is the essence of the wheel.

Pots are formed from clay,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the pot.

Walls with windows and doors form the house,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the home

One detail not mentioned by Iain (as far as I can see) is that while in the West we still sometimes work with a folk ontology of four elements: earth, fire, air and water, in several eastern traditions they work with five. The Eastern tradition I know best is Vedanta, particularly how it is expressed in the philosophical roots of traditional Indian medicine, Ayurveda. Their fifth element is Akash (Ākāśa (आकाश)), a term loosely translated as ‘sky’ but closer in meaning to space or ether. Akash is considered the subtlest element, and it contains and maintains the others. No akash, no vibrations. No vibrations, no sounds. No sounds, no ॐ, no Ohm, no primordial sound from which existence arises.

I have had several amusing conversations with my Indian mother-in-law, Vatsala, where I have expressed my confusion about how this fifth element differs from air. To take the second stanza from the Tao te Ching above (a different tradition, but it serves the purpose). The western mind tends to think the pot is a kind of ‘earth’, it contains ‘air’, but we do we really need ‘space’ to make sense of it? I would ask my Amma: What does the idea of space do here that air does not? And she would seem perplexed and say: “The air is in the space”, and look at me for recognition. The meaning of Akash is encapsulated in the line: “the empty space within it is the essence of the pot.”

In the West, we used to have a similar idea of ether, and even Aristotle invoked it. Ether and Akash are not identical, but they are both a recognition of space as a subtle holding phenomenon with real effects. There is a history of how ether was abandoned in the history and philosophy of science that I remember studying at Oxford. Just as I expressed incredulity to my mother-in-law, our intellectual tradition gradually discarded the notion of ether as redundant and gratuitous, decisively so in physics due to Einstein’s work on special relativity (c1905), which indicated that light does not need anything other than spacetime to travel through. While that may be so for physics, I am beginning to think the loss of ether may have been collateral damage to our metaphysics, from which we have arguably not recovered. And now I understand better why the theosophists speak of history in terms of ‘the akashic records’.

Our loss of appreciation for depth may be related to presuming to understand space. Just because we can draw lines for the dimensions of up-down, back-front, left-right doesn’t mean we know where we are. As Colin McGinn warns:

What we need from space, practically speaking, is by no means the same as how space is structured in itself. I suspect that the very depth of embeddedness of space in our cognitive system produces in us the illusion that we understand itm much better than we do.

I wonder, then, if practices like Yoga and Tai Chi are not just about reconnecting the mind and the body, but also attending to space as a feature of reality, almost as if tasting it. I also wonder if ‘being in nature’ is partly about reconnecting with space emotionally, almost like keeping in touch with a friend. Perhaps much of mental illness is about the literal loss of space, in our living arrangements, in our built-up cities, in the narrow range of movements involved in pulling a screen towards our faces. Perhaps space is the primary nutrient of soul food; maybe we are meant to taste it together.

This might all seem an elaborate detour from modernity, but it all calls into question what Giddens thinks of as one of its defining features. Maybe what is happening today is not really about the severing of time from space. Perhaps a better way to understand why we are afflicted by the juggernaut is that we have lost the capacity to resist it. And why? Because the quintessential element of resistance is space, and we have created a space-shaped hole in our metaphysics.

We may have forgotten and forsaken the subtle nature of space and the profound importance of space. What if the injunction of our times is not to allow modernity to die, but to slow down the juggernaut by using space to resist the severing of time from space? Perhaps, in a Gebserian sense, we do not develop beyond modernity, but move beyond its exclusivity, by reincorporating much that has been unwisely jettisoned in the name of progress. Perhaps only then can something suitably new truly emerge, rather than being forced upon us.

I did not expect to end up here, but here I am: the cosmic centrality of space, our need for space, our love of space. At this time of destructive acceleration, what we need may lie in the too-long-forgotten. So I am left for now with the question:

What would it mean for modernity to be resisted by the reimagining and reinhabiting of space, and how might that relate to becoming reaquainted with our long-lost fifth element?

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