7 - On Spaces and Experiences: Modern Displacements, Interpretations and Universal Claims

Summary

Introduction

THE TENDENCY to spatially displace imaginaries of societies and their specific historical development is not new. The interpretation of a space based on geographical orientation has indeed seldom been based on any natural idea of what the space is (Gregory 1994; Garfield 2013). Recently, though, much attention has been devoted to the discussion of space as a political and historical entity. It has been rediscovered as a privileged object for the analysis of different historical processes largely crystallised in different parts of the globe.

As part of this volume, in which the reader will find a variety of issues related to how spatial categories can be taken as ‘useful’ concepts for the inquiry into problems of the social world, this chapter addresses a relatively unexplored aspect of modern experience with space. This aspect concerns the relation between displacements of people in different spaces and the production of knowledge/interpretation. It argues that the South, understood for now simply as a specific localisation of historical relations, has always been a space where general trans-regional theories and concepts have emerged. As with so-called ‘Northern theory’, ‘Southern theory’ shares similar pretensions of universality and also proceeds by exercising similar gestures of historical erasure. Hence, from this point of view, there is not a strong purely intellectual distinction that could split Northern and Southern thought. However, an important aspect constituting what could be regarded as something that does split a Northern from a Southern intellectual tradition is that the former has departed from the idea of spatial neutrality as a condition for the production of theories, as Mignolo (2011) has shown; and the latter, on the contrary, has interpreted itself and its place in the world through what is called here a critical localisation of argument. This critical localisation of discourse is done without any prejudice against the production of universal claims. Henceforth, this chapter highlights what could be an important difference detected between the ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ intellectual traditions, but argues in favour of the existence of similar claims of universality despite the location of knowledge/interpretation.