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Orientation: Approaches to Place in Northern Irish Poetry ] 13 is a major shift in approach. The spatial turn does not represent a full swing of the pendulum from the total hegemony of time to that of space but rather a rebalancing attempt that acknowledges the significance of space in the interpretation of experience. Taking Michel Foucault as his guide, Edward Soja traces the respective understanding of space and time since the 19" century, emphasising the essentially antithetical interpretation of the two, with space seen as “fixed, dead, undialectical”™ and time as “richness, life, dialectic”.'” Writing in the 1980s, Soja would point out the consequent movement, perhaps even a shift, towards an emphatic position of geography in critical theory for a synoptic handling of space and time, with the prospect of “a more balanced critical theory that re-entwines the making of history with the social production of space.”!? What necessitates such a shift is the predominantly physical view of space which “tended to imbue all things spatial with a lingering sense of primordiality and physical composition, an aura of objectivity, inevitability, and reification.” The result of such an approach is essentially a misconstrued epistemology that does not and cannot regard space as a social construct: Space as a physical context has generated broad philosophical interest and lengthy discussions of its absolute and relative properties (a long debate which goes back to Leibniz and beyond), its objectifiable geometry, and its phenomenological essences. But this physical space has been a misleading epistemological foundation upon which to analyse the concrete and subjective meaning of human spatiality. Space in itself may be primordially given, but the organisation, and meaning of space is a product of social translation, transformation, and experience.” This argument, together with Soja’s use of the phrase “production of space” alludes to the ideas set forth by Henri Lefebvre, proposing a “science of space” that could account for a more comprehensive understanding of space from its mathematical implications to its realisation as part of the social context of existence." The proposed theory would represent a realisation of unity between fields that Lefebvre terms physical, mental and social space. By physical space he refers to “nature, the Cosmos”,”” by mental various “logical and formal abstractions”,'® whereas in dealing with social space “we are concerned with logico-epistemological space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects 11 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 11 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 11 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 11 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 79 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 79-80 16 cf. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 8-9 17 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 11 18 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 11 12 13 14 15
