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The Erasmus Medal Heinz Nixdorf Memorial Lecture
Genealogy and the Coming of Spatial Turn
In his 1967 lecture 'Of Other Spaces', Michel Foucault claims that 'the great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history... The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.'1Foucault's intimations of the shift from the temporal to the spatial organization of knowledge were encouraged by structuralism, which, with its orientation towards systematicity, synchrony, relationality, and the hard sciences, was conquering the humanities: 'Structuralism, or at least that which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other - that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration' (Ref. 1, p. 22). After its delayed publication in 1984, Foucault's text inspired the first explicit claims about the paradigm shift; since then, the idea of the spatial paradigm has been propagated among several human sciences.2Drawing on Foucault's notion of heterotopia and Henri Lefebvre's 1974 The Production of Space, the geographer Edward Soja (in his Postmodern Geographies of 1989) and the literary theorist Fredric Jameson (in his 1991 Postmodernism) launched the term 'spatial turn' in the context of their respective diagnoses of the postmodern condition, late capitalism, and what David Harvey called 'time-space compression'.3-5Thus, it was globalization and postmodern critique that produced the concept of space as a complex network of flows and multilayered temporalities.6
Granted, Foucault admits that 'it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space' (Ref. 1, p. 22). In the humanities and social sciences, space had actually been considered a shaping force well before the...