Thirdspace
Soja developed a theory of Thirdspace in which “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.” As he explains, “I define Thirdspace as an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectices of spatiality-historicality-sociality.” Soja constructs Thirdspace from the spatial trialectics established by Henri Lefebvre in Production of Space and Michael Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. He synthesizes these theories with the work of postcolonial thinkers from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to bell hooks, Edward Said to Homi K. Bhabha.
Like Lefebvre, sometimes called a mystical Marxist, Soja demonstrates leanings towards a monadic mysticism in his Thirdspace. He formulates Thirdspace by analogy with the Aleph, a concept of spatial infinity developed by Jorge Luis Borges. Thirdspace is a radically inclusive concept that encompasses epistemology, ontology, and historicity in continuous movement beyond dualisms and toward “an-Other”: as Soja explains, “thirding produces what might best be called a cumulative trialectics that it radically open to additional otherness, to a continuing expansion of spatial knowledge.” Thirdspace is a transcendent concept that is constantly expanding to include “an-Other,” thus enabling the contestation and re-negotiation of boundaries and cultural identity. Soja here closely resembles Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridization, in which “all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity,” that “displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives… The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.”
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