Law of Space, Space of Law:(Part I: Orientation via Goodrichand contra Harvey)*

CHRISTOPHER STANLEYUniversity of Kent, Canterbury, U.K.

Introduction

This two-part essay develops themes first presented in my article “Repres-sion and Resistance: Problems of Regulation in Contemporary UrbanCulture” (Stanley 1993a, b). The present article is concerned with analysingthe relationship between economics and culture in terms of the regulationof the everyday of the individual in the postmodern city or Megalopolis. InPart I, the contributions made in this field by, respectively, David Harveyand Peter Goodrich are interrogated. This paper seeks to explain theimportance of regulation of space and movement within the contemporaryurban environment. Part II of this essay (Transgressive Strategies forSurviving Megalopolis) begins to analyse the urban as a potential site ofresistance and the forms that that resistance might assume in the formationof identity and community.

There were laws to ensure our return. Not to return was to risk beingpunished. Living as we did — on the edge — we developed aparticular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in andfrom the inside out. We focused our attention on the centre as well ason the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded usof the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of bothmargin and centre. Our survival depended on an on-going publicawareness of the separation between margin and centre and an on-going private acknowledgement that we were a necessary, vital part ofthat whole. (hooks 1991, 149).

*Part II of this essay, “Transgressive Strategies for Surviving Megalopolis”, will appear in thenext issue of the journal

International Journal of the Sociology of Law 1995, 23, 1–21

0194–6595/95/010001 + 21 $08.00/0 © 1995 Academic Press Limited

Harvey’s Particular Postmodern Condition

This article begins with a partial examination and contingent definition ofsome of its central themes. This exercise is undertaken through theinterrogation of a text which forms a margin to this work and whichtherefore helps to define a centre. It is an exercise which inverts thetechniques of the centre (that which universalizes) through excluding thatwhat it is not. In confronting The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey(1989) is able to summarize his argument in four paragraphs. It is anachievement enviable in its certainty. I shall take this achievement as astarting point on two levels. First, regarding the wonder of the moment ofalterity. Second, as a point of departure in utilizing Harvey’s work so as toposition my own, my centre established through his margin. Here I amconcerned with the art of critique and the nature of the critical exercisewhich this work is partly concerned and engaged with. Harvey’s ‘Argu-ment’ provides a moment of jarring juxtaposition:

There has been a seachange in cultural as well as in political–economicpractices since around 1972.This sea change is bound up with the emergence of new dominant waysin which we experience space and time.While simultaneity in the shifting dimensions of time and space is noproof of necessary or causal connection, strong a priori grounds can beadduced for the proposition that there is a sole kind of necessaryrelation between the rise of postmodernist cultural forms, theemergence of more flexible modes of capital accumulation, and a newround of ‘time-space compression’ in the organization of capitalism.But these changes, when set against the basic rules of capitalisticaccumulation, appear more as shifts in surface appearance rather thanas signs of the emergence of some entirely new postcapitalist or evenpostindustrial society. (Harvey 1989: vii).

The encounter with an alien taxonomy can be a comic and wonderousexperience. It can also be deeply antagonistic and humiliating in whichone confronts another’s certainty in the image of the world so far removedfrom what has been previously perceived as the real: the stark impossibilityof thinking that. The centre becomes relocated and you discover yourselfelsewhere. Harvey erases the certainty of the image of a fracturedpostmodern ‘other’ in flattering need of the remedy of wholeness that hismarxism might then provide.

But as Meaghan Morris comments, following Michel Foucault, what iswonderful about the moment of alterity is that we apprehend, in an‘exotic’ system of the thought, “the limitation of our own” (Morris 1992:253). The critical and cultural practices that Harvey reduces to the samemay constitute a world of difference to me, but they also set practical limits

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to my everyday working environment. Harvey forces me to confront myown parochialism and more specifically, the tensions and paradoxesinherent in my view of the ‘postmodern city’ and the stories that I desire totell about it. But there are many ways of telling stories. As neither anexponent of affirmative postmodernism or an opponent of Marxism, I amhowever alarmed by Harvey’s reduction of the fragmented, ephemeral andchaotic condition of the contemporary into a resolutely determinist “time-space compression and flexible accumulation” (capital and labour). Itappears that Harvey can only analyse postmodernity by first rewriting as ‘thesame’, all the differences that for him constitute it as a topic for debate inthe first place. This allows him to state that “If there is a meta-theory withwhich to embrace all these gyrations of postmodern thinking and culturalproduction, then why should we not deploy it?” (Harvey 1989: 337). In hisreductionist world, such a statement is easily made. But counter this withJean-Francois Lyotard’s postmodern clarion call and such certainty isimmediately vanquished: “The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; letus be witness to the unrepresentable; let us activate the differences andsave the honour of the name” (Lyotard 1984: 82).

It is possible to commence from the position that there is no such meta-theory, and that there are good reasons why we should not pretend thatthere is and to deploy it. What Harvey appropriates is a partial reading ofLyotard. Harvey undertakes an enquiry into the origins of cultural change.He is impressed by the pace and variety of change in the advancedsocieties, and accepts a version of the modernity–postmodernity distinc-tion. He concludes, however, that recent transformations are “certainlywithin the grasp of historical materialist enquiry, even capable oftheorization by way of the meta-narrative of capitalist development thatMarx proposed” (Harvey 1989: 328). Harvey’s problem lies in therepression — the great effort — to make the phenomenon fit theframework, capped by the announcement that the framework fits thephenomenon. Lyotard undertakes a Report on Knowledge. He challengesthe framework and explores the phenomenon. Harvey never confrontsLyotard’s thesis about postmodern knowledge. Instead, he treats Lyotard’swork as a symptom of the postmodern condition, using fragments ofLyotard’s discourse to create his own image of postmodernism as a whole.Thus Lyotard’s ‘grand narrative’ and ‘metadiscourse’ merge in Harvey’s‘meta-theory’, and the ‘specifity’ that Lyotard accords to ‘language games’is converted by Harvey into a ‘fetishism’ of ‘impenetrable’, ‘opaqueotherness’ (Harvey 1989: 117). ‘Meta-theory’ and ‘otherness’ thus repre-sent major stakes for Harvey’s critique of postmodernism — a defence oftotalising Marxism and an attack on particularism. Lyotard becomes ThePostmodern Condition from which Harvey constructs his particularagenda.

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But where is Lyotard and what stories does he wish to tell? Harvey givesus only his particular reading of the anxiety that Lyotard arouses andmisses completely the sarcasm of Lyotard’s text. For example, Harvey citesthe following passage in which Lyotard becomes the arch postmodernistwho accommodates art to capitalism: “Eclecticism is the degree zero ofcontemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western,eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Parisperfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong” (Harvey 1989: 87citing Lyotard 1984: 76). What Harvey fails to include (or is deliberatelyblind to) is Lyotard’s statement following this extracted passage, which ispreceded by a semi-colon and not by a full stop: “(K)nowledge is a matterfor TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works” (Lyotard 1984:76). In fact, ironically, Harvey echoes Lyotard’s concern with the ‘anythinggoes’ culture but Lyotard becomes, in Harvey’s reading, the celebrant ofthat culture. It allows Harvey to compose and confront a single‘postmodern’ position competitive with his own. Lyotard’s contempt for ‘TVgames’ disappears in Harvey’s quotation just as the similarity between thetwo is dismissed. Harvey, paradoxically, produces an image of ‘Lyotard’, arepresentation of a particular truth and value. Therefore, Harvey’s textbecomes of itself a fiction. This has grave consequences for his thesis. Itlocks in a theory of representation as reductive, not productive, of socialexperience — it cannot tell the difference. What Harvey is left with, after thefailure of his deployment of the materialist critique in comprehending theephemeral and the nostalgic, is ambivalence. What ‘postmodernism’ leavesHarvey with is a space alien to Marxist analysis, which is peculiar becausethis is the very space that defines the postmodern condition. Harvey findsrefuge in an ‘other space’ which of itself is the site of production of‘othering’ tropes in response to images because the interpretation of thisspace depends on denying its own status — like theirs — as representation,as material production, as ‘image’. Harvey is compelled to install hisdiscourse in the endless circuit of its own specularity — “oscillatingbetween desire and hostility for that ‘other space’, its mirror image”(Morris 1992: 271). Harvey becomes confined as the theorist of the‘gigantic pincer of the dialectic’ which means that Harvey is confined towaste in which ‘postmodernism’ becomes a privileged non-space of Marxistself-reflection.

Foucault has a term for an ‘other space’: heterotopia. Harvey, thinking ofan ‘impossible’ space, relates this to the postmodern sense of ‘incongruousspace’ (Harvey 1989: 48). For Foucault, ‘other’ does not mean ‘impos-sible’. Utopia is a placeless place; heterotopias are real places, socialcountersites which may, but need not, juxtapose incompatible spaces.Between utopia and heterotopia there exists “a sort of mixed, jointexperience” — the mirror. It is utopian since “I see myself there where I

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am not, in an unreal virtual space that opens up behind the surface”. Butthe mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts “a sort of counteraction” onmy own position; gazing back at myself, I “reconstitute myself there whereI am” (Foucault 1986: 24). Harvey’s reflection does not appear in thismirror.

Harvey acknowledges a ‘radical edge’ to what he calls postmodernism’sstress on the “multiple forms of otherness”. He also wants to interpretpostmodernism as “mimetic of the social, economic and political practicesin society” (Harvey 1989: 113), again putting cultural practice outsidesocial relations. He next wants to say that postmodernism is not ‘solelymimetic’, but “an aesthetic intervention in politics, economy and social lifein its own right” (Harvey 1989: 114). But he has no way of differentiatingaesthetic interventions, no way of explaining how they relate to other kindsof actions, and no way of theorizing the “conjoining of mimesis andaesthetic intervention” (Harvey 1989: 115) that he asserts but cannotexplain. It is this failure that allows a different voice to speak anotherstory.

Other Spaces (1): Different Journeys in the Urban

So I am left with this disjuncture and this dysfunctional intervention to tryto read the space which might otherwise be occupied by the self-reflectivemeta-commentators. The non-deployment of a meta-narrative allows me toarticulate the simultaneous rupture and suture of contemporary discoursesand the shattering and bonding of the homogeneity of the dominant formsof cultural existence. The postmodern is not a philosophy of fragmentationbut rather of the peculiar persistence of the ‘dominant’ institutionalnarratives and structures of the modern which are invariably representedas an homogeneous totality, without contradictions, universalizing throughexclusion the determination of the legitimacy of what is real, an order ofmoveable signs. This is one of the more alarming oversights of thecommentators and a partial excuse for Harvey’s irritating position. It isnecessary therefore to interrogate the persistence of the modern throughthe opportunities provided in the glimpses of the postmodern: thedefinition of the centre by the determination of the margin. Here thepostmodern becomes the intermediary of subtle, subaltern and alternativevoices narrating other stories. Such an activation and interrogation of theseother voices takes place in the spaces in between, the interstices and thespaces of otherness, those countersites to the colonized spaces of thecontemporary meta-narratives which constitute the fragile structures ofexistence.

A glimpse of the ‘other’ side can only be made available through thedeployment of the impression or the creation of an ambience as to the

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nature of the disorganization of the contemporary from which thedominant forces constantly strive to reproduce and reconstruct themselves.The metaphor becomes the principal mechanism through which experi-ence can be articulated, and it is the spatial as opposed to the temporalmetaphor which is persistent within postmodern theory. But it is importantto note that whilst the metaphor serves as a device of translatingexperience, spatial relations are power relations representing geo-strategicinterests. What must be examined is the mutual translation betweengeographical and metaphorical space and the nullification of thesignificance in philosophical and political terms of absolute space. It is notspace per se that expresses power, but the thoroughly naturalized absoluteconception of space that developed with capitalism, and which expresses avery specific tyranny of power. The spatial metaphor must therefore beapproached as one extreme complexity. It is a complexity which can bedemonstrated in the metaphor of the central determinant in theorganization of contemporary power relations, the metaphor of the map ofthe city.

In its everyday details, its mixed histories, languages and cultures and inits elaborate evidence of global tendencies and local distinctions, the site/sight of the city, as both a real and an imaginary space-place, apparentlyprovides a ready map for reading, interpretation and comprehension. Yetthe very idea of a map, which its implicit dependence upon the survey ofa stable terrain, fixed referents and measurement, seems to contradict thepalpable flux and fluidity of metropolitan life and cosmopolitan move-ment. Maps are full of references and indications, but they are notpeopled. A preliminary orientation hardly exhausts the reality in which youfind yourself. The city plan is a rationalization of space and time andpermits us to grasp an outline — some sort of location — but not thecontexts, cultures, histories, languages, experiences, desires and hopes thatcourse though the urban body. The latter pierce the topography and spillover the edges of the map.

Beyond those edges and abstract, one-dimensional indications, weencounter the space of the vibrant, everyday world and its challenge ofcomplexity. This is the gendered city, the city of ethnicities, the territoriesof different social groups, shifting centres and peripheries. The city is botha fixed object of design and simultaneously plastic and historical: the siteof transitory events, movements and memories. This is the experience ofthe city as both the site/arena of struggle and a site/arena of discourse.Here both thought and everyday activities move in the realm ofuncertainty. Linear argument and certainty break down as we findourselves orbiting in a perpetual paradox around the wheel of being: webestow sense yet we can never be certain in our proclamations. The idea ofcultural complexity weakens earlier schemata and paradigms; it destabi-

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lizes and decentres previous theories and sociologies (including law). Thenarrow arrow of linear progress (Harvey’s dialectic) is replaced by the openspiral of hybrid cultures and contaminations. The city suggests creativedisorder, an instructive confusion, an interloping space in which theimagination carries you in every direction, even toward the previouslyunthought. Here dissonance and interrogation lie between situated anddisembodied knowledges and the very location of theory is disturbed.

What is at stake in such a realization is what Iain Chambers calls “AJourney Without Maps” (Chambers 1993: 190): the undermining of thepresumed purity of thought. It will be recalled that Martin Heideggertranslated ethos as “the place where one lives or dwells”. The spatial andtopographical metaphor thus assumes an even greater relevance at thislevel. The issue becomes one of internal nomadic thought struggling withexternal symbolic thought. The metropolitan/urban which is simultane-ously Alphaville and Interzone (parallel spaces) causes us to travel andexperience the surface fusion of identity organized around the privilegedvoice and stable subjectivity of the external whilst failing to mask thedislocation of the intellectual subject of the internal: dislodging the inertiaof the I (and the Eye):

It leads to the release of diverse voices, an encounter with an ‘other’side, an unfolding of the self, and negates the possibility of reducingdiversity to the identical. Knowledge takes a holiday, a sabbatical, fromthe traditional ideas of truth and scholarship as unitary and transcen-dental entities. Against the virility of a self-assured, strong thought itproposes a weaker, but more extensive, mode of thinking that iscontaminated, transgressive, multi-directional and transitive. (Cham-bers 1993: 190).

Other Spaces (2): Alternative Co-ordinates of the Urban

Chambers provides a convenient moment at which to state four of theprincipal concerns of this project in understanding the relation betweenlaw and space:

1. The theme of postmodernity operating as a potential site of critique notof the imminence of the present but as a parallel intermediate positionfrom which to analyse through the disjuncture of itself the strangepersistence of the ‘dominant’ institutional narratives and structures ofthe modern which now appear always in percipient fragmentation. Thusthe postmodern as a particular frame of analysis articulates differenthistories, nuances and narratives that combine in making up ourpresent.

2. The theme of the space which constitutes the relations of power and

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knowledge within the urban. It is tempting to become trapped by thebinary oppositions of space and non-space, self and other, which sooften circulate in contemporary critical discourse. It is possible tosuggest that there exist spaces or moments which are yet to be colonizedby competing narrative regimes, spaces which exist or are yet to existwhich are in between the paradigms of the real and the imaginary,spaces which exist beyond the border but which do not form adeterminate presence: “A boundary is not that at which somethingstops, but, as the Greeks recognised, the boundary is that from whichsomething begins its presencing” (Heidegger 1971: 154). This is therealm of the interstice or that of otherness as a opposed to the binarycentred realm of the other [1].

3. The theme of tension between arenas of discourse and arenas of dispute(sites of repression and sites of resistance). In positing the remarkableresilience of the meta-narrative forms of the modern and theirarticulation as institutional structures, despite continuous erosion andfragmentation, it can be suggested that there exists an on-going conflictand pattern of tension. I pose this issue in terms of the nature ofregulation read as governmentality in the form, once again to adopt aspatial metaphor, of the colonization of and the struggle for thedetermination of everyday experience and existence. Colonizationinvolves the conquest, inhabitation, possession and control of a territoryby an external power. Decolonization becomes a metaphor for theprocess of recognizing and dislodging relations of repression asexternally imposed — literally of making a cultural and psychic place ofone’s own.

4. The former point is related to the nature of ethics in the contemporary.This is not a work of ethics but does attempt to engage with theproblems of representation and value (particularly as applied to desire)in the articulation of a relevant ethical position for surviving thecontemporary. An intimation of this ethical position can be providedthrough the image of refusal. The postmodern has been classified as anera of refusal (see for example Kearney 1991). There is the refusal ofthe grand narrative and the refusal of the modern subject of truth.There is also the subject that is refused and can refuse and becomeother [2]. As Foucault notes, this is the subject of a language whichtransgresses the “boundaries of imagination” and which shatters thelimits of the transcendental imagination (Foucault 1973). Throughoutthis work, the refused of the postmodern is interrogated both so as to beable to reflect back onto the ‘dominant’ narratives and institutions ofthe modern but also in relation to the idea that it is possible to moveforward — between boundaries — and that there is somewhere to go.To follow a narrative framework regarding ethics, it is possible to suggest

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a pragmatic of ethics, prefaced upon the multiplicity of narratives andthat an ethics is therefore a responsibility to listen to other narratives(see further Lyotard 1985: 93–100). In terms of locale, followingHeidegger, an ‘ethics’ therefore becomes part of an arena of discoursesas opposed to an arena of struggle. To be ethical would be, in a simplesense, to inhabit an open space, a space without limit to narrative formin which there is constant reinterpretation of the voice–image–story ofthe other, a bearing constant witness to the other which is unrepresent-able: place as a community of others.

Margins, Centres and Interstices

This concern with other perspectives, other stories and other spacesbecomes one of drawing upon the vocabularies of established lexicons andlanguages (and remaining subject to those languages) in establishingtrajectories of interests and desires that are neither necessarily determinednor captured by the system in which they develop. In this sense, we partakein an exercise of disorientation, we all become nomads migrating across asystem that is too vast to be our own, but in which we are fully involved,translating and transforming bits and elements into local instances of sensewhich become habitable as though “they were a space borrowed for amoment by a transient, an immigrant, a nomad” (Chambers 1992: 193).

Therefore, we are dealing with the temporal and the contingent. It is aspace of continual movement. The spatial metaphor, which is so powerful,does not, as I have intimated, necessarily mean ‘new’ space — theheterotopia is possible — but a countersite from within the disorder of theurban, at the margins of that order or causing the margins of that space asa determined order to become apparent in the very de-determination ofdecolonization of that space as the disordered space of otherness. To be‘on the margin’ can imply exclusion from the centre but also the bondingof social, political and economic relations as peripheries to the centre. Inthis way, ‘margins’ become signifiers of everything ‘centres’ deny orrepress. In this way ‘margins’ as ‘other spaces’ become not merely theparadigm of the binary opposition but also serve as the condition ofpossibility of all social and cultural entities. In these ‘centres’, self-centredand entrenched groups inflate their opinions to ostensibly universalproportions. But in the contemporary, given the struggle for the universalbetween competing dominant reference groups, everything is on themargin. As Michel de Certeau notes “(T)here is no way out, the factremains that we are foreigners on the inside — but there is no outside”(Certeau 1988: 13–14). We must, therefore, constantly approach andcontest the limits, exploring the possibility of the present in thearticulation of the multiplicity and plurality of discourses without

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becoming subject to the particular or becoming trapped within the realmof specifity. Thus we must all become nomads (following Gilles Deleuze) orstrangers (following Julia Kristeva) fulfilling the Simmelian prophecy(Simmel 1971).

It has become tempting for some theorists (notably Jean Baudrillard) torevel in a critique of the sign (fetishism and simulacrum) that is simply adeceptive surface and appearance which mystifies the manifestation of anunderlying reality: the alienation of the human condition achievedthrough hyper-conformity in the excess of individuality (see for exampleBaudrillard 1993). But this reduction to a hidden value denies theontological reality of signs, appearances and everyday life. It denies thatthere are sites of sense and meaning. It is a tension inherent incontemporary critiques of existence in urban culture and one which I haveanalysed elsewhere (indeed, retrieving terms such as affluence, anomieand alienation: see further Stanley 1993a, b) with specific reference to themode of reproduction and consumption and the transition in the natureof capital (over)accumulation. I mirror Harvey’s concerns — and perhapsarrive at similar conclusions but through very different routes — andpresent an analysis which suggests the possibility of the excess ofconsumption provoking a refusal of consumption and therefore acondition of dis-alienation through the implosion of capitalist (over-)accumulation. But it is necessary to follow the pessimistic logic ofBaudrillard’s argument so as to keep under view the naive assumption thatit is possible to move forward when, perhaps, there is no more space left[3]. The question becomes one of the role of critique and analysis in suchcircumstances, where we are all foreign bodies surviving at the limit, alwaysawaiting the arrival of the post.

Spaces of Politics (1)

Critique is one of the most problematic words within the academic lexicon.It is possible to venture the simple assertion that critique can be equatedwith clarity. In Kant (1963) and later in Marx, the process of critique servesto render explicit what otherwise would remain implicit. The word processimplies an active participation and it is this participation that Foucault’sreading of Kant develops. Foucault’s interpretation of critique becomes“the art of not being governed” (Foucault 1991). Critique is the process bywhich the subject is given the right to discover the truth by exercising anart of voluntary insubordination and of thoughtful disobedience. Thisbecomes a twist on the Kantian definition of enlightenment when theindividual has the courage to follow his or her own reason in public and inprivate (Kant advocates a private reason and a private obedience). It is acourage which Foucault interprets as the Nietzschean injunction of the

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“will to know” (Miller 1993: 303). Critique becomes Lyotard’s project inbeing witness to the unrepresentable and in the activation of the differencein the defence of an increasingly complex and fragile heterogeneity fromthe forces of homogenizition (Lyotard 1988: 73). Critique is an attitude,cynical but also affirmative, a demonstration of courage and a radicalacceptance of the vulnerability of the other. Therefore, within the frame ofethics established above, critique becomes both an incredulity towardmeta-narratives and, in the process of exercising incredulity, to placeoneself on the ‘outside’ of the established parameters of reason, even ifthat includes placing morality, rights and justice in a maelstrom ofuncertainty. To consider the terms that are accorded so high a politicalvalue in the contemporary — autonomy, fulfilment, responsibility, choice— from this perspective is to question whether they mark a kind ofculmination of ethical evolution. But this does not imply that we shouldsubject these terms to a critique: for example, by claiming that the rhetoricof freedom is an ideological mask for the working of a political system thatsecretly denies. We should, rather, examine the ways in which these idealsof the self are bound up with a profoundly ambiguous set of relationsbetween individuals and political power. Critique becomes a tool of analysisin an understanding of the processes of power relations in the constructionand utilization of subjectivity. Once again, to make the centre clear onemust establish one’s position in the margin: “The point of critique is notjustification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility” (Deleuze1983). It is critique as the sensibility of the without-law in the individualdemonstration of insubordination and disobedience (the art of theungovernable). Therefore, part of the role of critique is an understandingof desire as a manifestation of this resistance to self-incurred tutelage. Ifone searches for a meaning to desire within a humanistically orientatedreplacement discourse (one that liberates desire in the respect of theother), then this form of critique has to take place in a political economythat offers far-from-equilibrium conditions in which both order anddisorder are produced in the sense of engaging in the activity of disputeand refusal in the articulation of desire as a moment of individualunderstanding in the truth of self and others.

Goodrich’s Law of Signs in the Urban

The other text which I utilize as a marker in this introductory tour of thecontemporary critical terrain exhibits similar anxieties to my own.Therefore as opposed to the feeling of alterity which accompanied myreading of Harvey, I experienced a feeling of sympathetic familiarity whenin reading The Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks,Peter Goodrich (1990a) suggests a thesis which returns us to the study of

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the art of law. In the wake of the break-up of earlier modernist andcontractarian notions of society and law, of meaning and rule, theremaining source of interrogation becomes the study of the representa-tions of legality — of legitimacy — which have become reality, “the onlyreality of postmodern culture” (Goodrich 1990a: 11). To pursue thatargument requires that we ‘look’ at specific images and trace not simplythe law of our vision but equally the presuppositions of the imagesthemselves. Goodrich considers these are images of a law that has brokendown and been reconstituted into more powerful and arbitrary forms: “itis a law of masks, of nomadic moveable signs that territoristically invade theintensive zones of everyday life” (Goodrich 1990a: 11). Regulation — ofthat which is Governmentality — becomes a matter of moving the signsand of controlling the avenues of the circulation of images. [“One of thefundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, orto utilise smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service ofstriated space” (Virilio 1986: 14,4)]. It is a moveable law whose centralconcern is the law of movement, a law of spatial organization in theconstant conflict between colonization–decolonization–recolonization: anomadic law reflecting the symbolic laws of capital in flight and which haveof themselves become nomadic thus rendering into confusion and crisisthe role of the State in its attempt to vanquish nomadism and to controlmigration. Thus another tension appears, the paradoxical function ofdisappearing capital in the implosion of the system of regulation. If thespace of the margin-other is dangerously temporal and contigent, then thespace of centre-state is dangerously static, rendered immobile through itsvery imperative of spatial governance: sclerotic acceleration.

Whereas Harvey (1989) persists in the economic determination of the‘time-space compression’, Goodrich (1990a) pursues a narrative ofmovement, a governance of intensive spaces and of a movement that nolonger moves but is merely a movement of the modes of transmission.Goodrich achieves an internal configuration within his text. Harvey’ssurvey is a static or specular text, diagnostic and distanced, in whichsignificant differences can be perceived only against a background ofsameness. Goodrich activates the difference and dares ask of the narrativesof the contemporary: Who is it that speaks? Who is speaking? WhereasHarvey inevitably conforms to the implicit rationalism of his particularmodernist meta-theory (marxism) which circumscribes the world from theoutside, as an external thing, Goodrich attempts to thaw out the frozenimage and to give voice to the inside, the harmartia of material life as it isfaced in the sensuous apprehension of thought asking troublesomequestions: Where are we? According to what law? At what cost? In whathistory? In whose speech? His strategy is to read the inner body, “the bodythat lives and feels through the law” (Goodrich 1990a: 259), and he has the

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courage to adopt a style which adheres to the cultural form in which hisintervention takes place. It is a style of resistance to the imaginary andfrozen images of logical schemata:

The postmodern condition is one of resistance, one in which tables areto be turned and rather than being on track, linked in, connected tothe exchange and remembered by the authorities, we turn to look atthe image of ourselves that the system presents. It is after all essentiallythe ambition of ghosts to be seen and of the dead to be remembered:for the living it is a matter of letting the body remember and then ofputting the ghost to rest. (Goodrich 1990a: 300).

Goodrich’s concern is with the tripartite nature of the image (sign): theinterpretation of the image, the value of the image and the circulation ofthe image. In terms of legal discourse, his project is one which attempts tounderstand the image of law (the iconography of symbolic authority) as arerepresented image. In his discussion of the contractarian tradition, hisagenda of resistance and sensibility becomes one which attempts tointerrupt the transmission of the image or to figure that the image iselsewhere. His comment upon David Walliker’s art installation ‘TheContract’ demonstrates his critical agenda regarding ‘postmodern law’ andprovides a potential site of further development and intervention.

The installation represents the allegorical movement of Rousseau’ssocial contract. A tomb is built to celebrate the author of the firstmodernist contract, a consensual and democratic agreement betweenequals. The state removes the remains of the author from the tomb andrests them in the Pantheon in the centre of Paris. An empty tomb remains:“In death he has been moved outside the contract; he is no longer there,no longer held to his word or bound to the agreement” (Goodrich 1990a:319). The contract has been renegotiated, interpreted to death, supple-mented — interrupted in the post. The empty tomb becomes a utopia, afictional place celebrating the myth of democracy which the contractpurported to establish between the People and the State:

But Rousseau is not there. Rousseau has slipped away. Jean-Jacques isno longer around; even his tomb is empty.

The artist has depicted Rousseau as ‘moonlighting’:

Far from remaining in the frame or staying within the contract,Rousseau has found alternative employment: that Rousseau is moon-lighting means that he is now working off the record, both erasing thecontract and working on the outside, in the black economy, outwith thelaw. In the imagery of the postmodern, working off the record suggests

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erasure of the tape, free play in a world made strange, a glimpse ofknowledge on the outside. (Goodrich 1990a: 323, my emphasis).

Unfortunately, that is where Goodrich leaves us, taking us to the edge,demonstrating what is possible if the aesthetic is privileged over therational as a tactic of resistance. His summons that the law shouldrecognize itself as always and already a deep structure of the erotic bodysubject to the gestures, the actions, the manipulations, the betrayals, thedesires and the demotic of everyday life — that we read the inner bodythat lives and feels through the world of law — is a unique and humanepsychoanalytic account of the symbolic legal order. Perhaps that is all thereis to say and the rest is silence.

There is an ambivalence here, the ambivalence between the certainty ofthe passed-past (the unity of the meta-narrative) and the uncertainty of thepresent (the multiplicity of narratives). It is the ambivalence achievedthrough the knowledge of the breach of the contract — that the letternever arrived at its destination although placed in the ordinary course ofthe post [4] — which is simultaneously emancipating in its relinquishmentof origin and unnerving in its nostalgia for the lost origin. It is the suddenawareness of the absence of origin which causes the nostalgia for origin,even if that origin is the tyranny of writing and the shackles of subjectionto a contract which never arrived but nevertheless contracts the individualwill (public obedience) to alien external authority masquerading as aparticipatory democracy. Freedom itself is the greatest threat to freedom:the double bind of democracy is that in a media-orientated epoch, culturalvalue becomes a function of the representation of stereotypical symbolicphantasmagoria.

The tape runs on in silence suggesting free play in a world made strange. Theimages of authority (law, regulation, government, repression) persist as aseries of ever changing masks. But if Jean-Jacques is not in his tomb, thenwhere has he gone? (Which mask is he wearing, if any?) There is an emptyspace — a trope — representing an absent presence. Goodrich suggeststhat Rousseau is working on the outside, in the black economy, outwith thelaw. Jean-Jacques working off-the-record. But what might this mean? It is aquestion which haunts the contemporary.

Working off-the-record, being outwith the law. If a sociological theory oflaw is concerned with being within the law in terms of the precariousmaintenance of order in the urban through regulation, then an inherentelement of this sociological perspective must inevitably be concerned withthe mirror of being without the law, or outwith the law, or the existence ofthe (with)outlaw in terms of the tensions of disorder in the urban throughderegulation. The spatial metaphor takes shape as the cultural terrain ofthe interstice or the borderzone. This countersite of complexity represents

14 C. Stanley

the turmoil of the everyday where we are all foreigners operating alongestablished lines and networks, subject to established forces and repre-sentations but constantly forcing the fracture of those certainties or beingsubject to the fracture of those certainties. This is the arena, the experienceand the moment of decolonization which is always the territory ofrecolonization. It is therefore a territory of conflict and tension, discourseand cohesion from within and without.

It would be convenient to lapse into the graphic and seductive languageof urban terrorism, asphalt sociopaths, ghetto warfare and inversesurveillance mechanisms. But that would be to fall prey to old myths. Thereare no barricades — distinct borders between ‘them’ and ‘us’ — left.There are only a series of disputed borders. The hard edge is no longerpolitical ideology but the far more insidious rule of nationalism andethnicity. More significantly, this language also falls prey to ghettoizationand therefore the disempowerment of other voices within an opaqueotherness, the specifity of this or that language game [5].

Spaces of Politics in the Urban (2)

There is a politics here but it is a politics which emerges from the ethicalposition which was presented earlier. It is a politics of resistance whichtakes account of the inevitability of the market and the superiority of thecontrol mechanisms. It therefore confronts the realities of politicaleconomy and the circumstances of global power. Therefore it is a politicswhich intervenes at a very dark point but whose aim is the establishment ofa humanistically determined replacement discourse of difference andotherness. And it must be a politics articulated as a resistance of the mostsubtle counterveiling level of activity. David Harvey and Robert Hewisonmight accuse me, in their different ways, of indeterminacy and of fallinginto the trap of the very ghettoization which I signalled earlier. What doesthis resistance mean?

One interpretation of resistance in the context in which the word isutilized here can be given in a comment made by the Ernesto Laclau andChantal Mouffe: “The discourse of radical democracy is no longer thediscourse of the universal … it has been replaced by a polyphony of voices,each of which constructs its own irreducible identity” (Laclau & Mouffe1985: 191–192). A polyphony of voices and the construction of identitystand as central elements in this political strategy of resistance to the forcesof repression through consumption. The polyphony of voices equate interms of identity with a multiplicity of narratives and the ethics ofresponsibility in listening to the narratives of others (“Our lives are boththe texts that we create, and texts created by the laws of others”) [6]. In sodoing, we undertake the construction of our identity in relation to others

Law of Space, Space of Law 15

and not in relation to an external authority of a meta-narrative. Therefore,the formation of individual identity takes place in an intimate arena wherewhat is recognized is the multiplicity of identities available to theindividual. This recognition of the comingling of identities can only occurin an arena of discourse. But it is an arena forged through struggle andrefusal in the establishment of deterritorialization in relation to thecultural norm of the meta-narrative. It is an arena characterized by theprovisional, the hybrid and the local: a community of plurality.

On this level of interpretation, resistance becomes a peculiarly intimateactivity, an intimacy in the sense of unconcerted action which perchancecoalesces into an articulation of refusal by self and others. It is necessarilyaction which is undetermined and does not betray its motive or causationin an accessible way. Therefore, there are multiple points of resistancewhere the known is prioritized. Identity must be continually assumed andimmediately called into question. It is therefore, to borrow a term fromradical psychoanalysis, a politics–poetics of schizoanalysis (see furtherPerez 1990). In terms of the formation of ‘communities of virtue’ or‘communities of resistance’, we are therefore concerned with thosecontingent elements of resistance whose differential unity is expressedthrough the arbitrary and random sensibilities of individual desire (“themeaning of your own life”) [7]. The process of critique becomes theidentification of these differential elements without merely subjectingthem to the imperative of colonization and order.

The operative in this project is the (with)out-law. At the moment whenthe process of the maintenance of order has entered the stage ofaccelerated sclerosis through the hyperinflation of regulatory strategies(the conflict in the signification of order), that which was repressed as theunrepresentable becomes no longer part of the equation and becomes therefused, the expelled, the disappeared. But that which is refused may alsorefuse and form its own transverse network within the margins ofgovernmentality. This network can be equated in a spatial sense with theemergence of deterritorialized space formed through the elision ofsubgroupings in the process of withdrawal from the freneticism of theschizophrenic repetition of the desire of the external order for determina-tion through classification. At this moment commences the struggle in thearticulation for transgression. These are moments which can only ever besupplementary but which constitute the condition of possibility from thewithin of the stagnant order of repression in which all emotions arerepressed except excitement.

The sites/sights of this experience of excitement — excess — aremarked like “flashes of lightning in the night” (Foucault 1977: 35). Theyare fleeting moments of the imagination crystalized into social practice,temporarily captured as the discourse of the legislative guerilla operating

16 C. Stanley

on the margins of the centre. In this space, the prior divisions becomeblurred into a multiplicity of survival zones (locations of struggle/communities of resistance). This moment of excess is marked by the arrivalof alternative forms of event. Activities of transgression determine the markof the event of excess (the presence at the edge of the border) [8]. Herethe inside and the outside join to form an undecidable play of perpetualdisplacement: the schizo-space of the heterotopia.

Within the schema of resistance as presented previously, the notion ofintimacy was introduced. Intimacy can mean either the local in acommunity sense or the intimacy of the individual. In utilizing the spatialmetaphor and the laws of movement in the operation of governmentality,it is important to be reminded of the centrality of the figure of the body.As Jameson (1991) following Lefebvre states, in order to recover the sitesof resistance:

(A) new kind of spatial imagination capable of confronting the past ina new way and reading its less tangible secrets off the template of itsspatial structures — body, cosmos, city, as all those marked the moreintangible organisation of cultural and libidinal economies andlinguistic form. (Jameson 1991: 364–365).

If the space of resistance is to become operative, it will reflect the socialproduction of individual desires in the formation of identity. Theidentification of this space of desire will also determine how relations ofpower (discipline) are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality ofsocial life, how human geographies become the subject of politics andideology. The space of desire is the space of the body as subject. The bodyexists in space and must either submit to the determination of desire by theexternal order or demonstrate the possibility of the expression of de-determined desire through spatial and temporal displacement and in theinterruption of fixed power relations. The irreduciability of the body in thesocial scheme of order means that it is from this site of power relations thatresistance in the activation of desire is situated. It is at this site/sight thatthe power of the gaze is most piercing in its capture of the moment ofexpression of transgression as that of the movement of desire.

“Transgression is an act which involves the limit” (Foucault 1977: 33). Inthis sense, transgression refers to the incessant crossing and recrossing ofa line which immediately redraws itself only to be crossed again. It is thusa political activity without apparent reference or determination, aperpetual revolution and displacement, made and unmade by that excesswhich transgresses it. “Limit and transgression depend on each other forwhatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it wereabsolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless ifit merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows” (Foucault

Law of Space, Space of Law 17

1977: 34). The possibility of transgression as a site/sight of resistancetherefore rests in its nature as a indeterminate space, a space that is not yetfixed. As space of resistance within desire, it is of the positive of disorder(“Nothing is negative in transgression”) operative against the negativity ofthe determined desire of order.

Here is where the out-laws are: not with-out law but simultaneouslywithin and without. Transgression measures the opening at the heart of thelimit tracing the flashing line that causes the limit to arise and thereforeestablishing the space of order and the space of disorder. In addition, itfurther serves as a moment toward transcendence from this spatialparadigm of order-disorder. Whilst order desires transgression it is wrongto consider that desire is repressed because it is order that constitutes bothdesire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, thepower relation is present. It is a power relation that is multiple, immanentand affirmative and therefore it becomes possible to play with thesimultaneous possibility that transgression is both the basis of legitimacyand that transgression carries this legitimacy away with it, representing theline of flight toward impossible spatiality — that which is beyond the limitof the name in the territory of radical subjectivity and counter-hegemonicresistance. This is the space where we recover ourselves.

Acknowledgements

A version of this article was presented at seminars at the followinginstitutions and I am grateful to all those participants who profferedcomments: Cardiff Law School, Newcastle Law School, Department ofSociology, London Guildhall University. I am especially grateful to RolandoGaete (South Bank) and Sam Whimster (London Guildhall) for theircomments.

Notes

1 Feminist theorists in particular have been trying to find a new space and a newlanguage with which to describe this space, while hoping to avoid the subjectionof that space and the colonization of that language by the old imperatives of maledomination. I was encouraged by Alice Jardine’s concept of Gynesis: “a map ofnew spaces yet to be explored” (Jardine 1985: 52). But when someone starts totalk about new spaces, new territories, new languages, without quite being able todescribe them, they are arguing as much through image and metaphor as theyare through evidence and logic. [A point made eloquently by Robert Hewison(1993: 248–253)]. I have made a claim for the value of image and metaphor asa device of ambience. It is necessary that the dry discourse of reason begins torun with the less channelled streams of the imagination. However my work isconstructed through a sequence of images which are not arbitrarily chosen. As

18 C. Stanley

with the problem of the fixation with the metaphor of fragmentation which hasbeen falsely attributed to the postmodern, the metaphor of the fracture or theinterstice similarly points to the interruption of the smooth surface ofreproduction. It is a gap which opens out towards the identification of newterritory, to be occupied by new forms. If then, we were to step back and trace allthese fractures and faultlines, it may be possible to see a new pattern, a newnetwork emerge. Somewhere between Jameson’s cognitive mapping andJardine’s “map of new spaces yet to be explored”, the idea hardens that there issomewhere to go, that it is possible to move forward. Heidegger can thus be readas an affirmative statement.

2 Goodrich (1990a) analyses this image of refusal through a reading of thecirculation of contracts in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1967). “Therefused may also, however, refuse. It may form its own network of communica-tion, and it is largely in the name of the other, of that which remains, that theheroine Oedipa pursues the signs and clues, the marks or traces, the drossoutside the contractual network, as indices of an underground postal network”(Goodrich 1990a: 175).

3 It is a sentiment expressed in liberal journalism: “Perhaps having becomeilliterate in the pursuit of self-hood, our horizon is simple. We should learn toread again. Start with Auden: “We must learn to love one another or die”. If wedon’t, what can we look forward to? London already looks like Los Angeles justas Beverley Hills is as razor-wire defended as the white suburbs of Johannesburgand Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner — conceived as science-fiction, then lookinglike an advert — now looks like a documentary. Parts of Manchester, Glasgow orBirmingham double for the outer circles of Hell. Forget the ban on A ClockworkOrange. Alex and his droogs appear weekly on Crimewatch” (Bracewell & Evans1993).

4 I draw here upon Goodrich’s reading of Jacques Derrida in his essay“Contractions” (1990b: 170–175). However, if a psychoanalytic interpretationwere to be adopted it is possible to state after Slavoj Zizek “Why Does A LetterAlways Arrive At Its Destination?” (Zizek 1992). Zizek adopts a Lacanianperspective in his reading of Derrida (1974) which presupposes the traditionalteleological trajectory with a preordained goal. However, it is Derrida’steleological interpretation of Rousseau that enables the metaphor of the letter,delivered from the modern to postmodern and subject to interruption, tooperate so powerfully.

5 This is David Harvey’s criticism of the ‘postmodern politics’ of Lyotard andDerrida. Harvey’s point is that, within his reading, these theorists neglect thedetermining economic dynamic of capitalist power relations and therefore arenot able to convincingly restructure such power relations so as to privilege “thevoice of the other” (Harvey 1989: 113–118).

6 A comment made by Douzinas et al. (1991: xiii).7 Which returns us to the central definition of Enlightenment as articulated by

Kant: “Enlightenment is man’s (sic) exit from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelageis man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction fromanother. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason butin lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Dareto know! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ — that is the motto of

Law of Space, Space of Law 19

enlightenment.” (Kant 1963: 3). As Foucault interprets this statement the stressis placed on courage as a precursor to Nietzsche’s injunction to discover themeaning of your life.

8 In using the term excess to denote what is being simultatively assessed it is onlypossible to evoke an impression (the ambience) of that which necessarily cannever be perfectly imaged or named: the unrepresentable. Through thislimitation the site of excess — the arena of the event of a transgression —remains fluid as a site of the perpetual potential for opposition and resistance.

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