Space in Critical Communication Studies

Few concerns in critical-cultural approaches to communication intersect with as many adjacent fields of inquiry as does “space.” To talk about space is to share a conversation with philosophers (Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Edward Casey, Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda), critical geographers (Derek Gregory, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey), historians (Fernand Braudel, Michel de Certeau), sociologists (Pierre Bourdieu, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs), literary and cultural theorists (Fredric Jameson, Meaghan Morris, Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, Timothy Morton), media ecologists (Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, James Carey), political theorists (Jane Bennett, Nigel Thrift), and rhetoricians (Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, Joan Faber McAlister, Jenny Rice, Nathaniel Rivers, Thomas Rickert). To talk about space is thus to talk with a plenitude of others about a plenitude of social practices, landscapes, mediums, objects, and configurations, but at bottom a concern with space is a concern with the kinds and qualities of relations between and among bodies and things. To be concerned with space is to be invested in the emergent scenery of arrangement, how groupings of bodies come to assume particular shapes and orderings and not others. The “how” question, in turn, is the question of communication as it leads to issues of influence and pressure: of the historical processes that shape our habits and modes of persuasion and constellations of power. Communication and space converge where the “how” of influence meets the “where” of historical emergence. While we have always lived and acted in importantly spatial ways, however, the critical-spatial consciousness that pervades the humanities today is itself a recent historical emergence.