communication and space, or the materiality of association

8/13/2019 Communication and space, or the materiality of association

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Communication and space, or the materiality of association

Abstract.Diverse approaches over the last few decades have emphasized space as an active part of social

processes. However I wish to explore this relation in a different way to most of these analyses in particular

by foregrounding the role of space in association, or relations between actors performed throughcommunication. My proposition is that if communication processes are really central to social life and the

reproduction of societies, and if there is indeed a profound relation between social processes and spatial

forms, then we can identify a potential role for space in the communication that constitute the connections

between our everyday acts. Here I look to show that although space is becoming a central theme, a systematic

theory of how our practices are related through webs of communication and their spaces still appears to be

missing. My aim is to explore the inherent relation of practice to space as an effect of meaning to be sure, a

Husserlian property of meaning as reference, a way to trace connections between our acts able to clarify the

role of space as both referential context for communication and a referential system capable of supporting and

fostering associations.

Introduction

Observe the people around us. Listen for a minute.We are immersed in communication.

This phrase comes from an imaginary dialogue I occasionally had with a theorist whose thinking

was shaped in a post-structuralist era, a fictitious period resulting from the theoretical endeavours of

a generation to overcome the limitations of key concepts of metaphysics notions such as structure

and meaning, reason and consciousness in favour of other dimensions of our experience like

emotion and desire. A theorist whose epistemology, though enriched, no longer allowed him to see

the importance of language and its contexts, or the intrinsic meaningfulness of interactions.

Especially when my imagined colleague abandoned the idea of meaning in name of the

destabilization of all concepts, he also lost the theoretical connection with the world of

communications that we produce. In fact this disconnection is real enough: it is very much alive in

theory. Recent performative and non-representational approaches, for example, have emphasized a

view of practice as almost automatic, fed more by preconscious impulses than by thought or

discursive acts.

However, despite being underestimated in recent theories and ontologies, communication is

central to our daily lives a fact certainly reinforced by the virtual omnipresence of mobile and

digital communication systems and devices. We are more communicative and more deeply

immersed in information than ever. It is this deepening of our capacity for communication through

language that I wish to explore in relation to the space of architecture and the city. And I wish to do

so in order to emphasize communication as a central aspect in the relation between society and

space.


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Diverse approaches over the last few decades have emphasized space as an active part of

social processes. However I wish to explore this relation in a different way to most of these

analyses in particular by foregrounding the role of space in practices of association, i.e. the

passage from individual to social acts enabled through communication. I wish to interpret this

communicative relation between acts and actors as a process constituted via the medium of space,

among other media. My proposition is that if communication processes are really central to the

reproduction of societies as social theorists such as Jrgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann claim,

and if there is indeed a profound relation between social processes and spatial forms, as scholars of

space such as David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre indicate, then we can identify a potential role for

space in the communications that constitute associations.Here I look to show that although space is

becoming a central theme beyond the disciplines originally dedicated to the topic (architecture,

urbanism, geography), a systematic theory of how our practices are related through webs of

communication oral, written and image-based and their spaces still appears to be missing, both

from the spatial disciplines and from those focused on the social.

My aim is to describe the place of space in the constant (re)production of the systems of

interactions that constitute socialities at two moments, interrelated and frequently overlapping but

with their own temporal and spatial conditions: (i) space as a referential context for our practices.

We relate to places and buildings as contexts for our joint acts and for our communication within

their borders. (ii) As actors we appropriate urban spaces as a way of relating our acts with those

performed in otherplaces and times, and with their effects as part of the constant reconstruction

of interactive systems expressed in/through space.

One may relate this aim to Latours sociology of association and its aim of render[ing]

social connections traceable (Latour, 2004:16) but instead of pursuing the movement of actants

or summoning an absolute ontological symmetry between human and non-human agencies, I shall

search to identify the ontological substrate that actually make up the connections between acts,

actors, as effects of meanings in our efforts to build associations. I also wish to explore an

alternative path to current ontologies of the social and material through a concept able to recognize

how material specificities might matter, looking into connections mediated by an active space aspace able to feed back into communication and further associations. This approach shall

reconstruct the traces between acts as traces enacted in space through a concept still little explored:

a Husserlian notion of meaning as reference. I wish to highlight these processes in such a way

that it would not only be legitimate to extend the communicative constitution of practice to space,

but if we wish to explain the role of space in social life and the processes of association it would

also be an epistemological necessity.

Practices of association


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Let us turn to a few concepts that can assist this material exploration of our forms of producing

socialities. Certain terms are typically used to refer to the problem of social practice, including

act and action, as well as the term practice itself. Though derived from relatively distinct

theoretical backgrounds, their meanings at least partially overlap. We can begin with the definition

of an act as a trace or a moment of our acting, materially perceivable but without defined borders

in time and space, that may continue until interrupted or silenced, like the act of speaking, the act of

cooperating in a given situation, or the bodily act of the gesture. This conception of the act includes

the spatiality of the gesture that constitutes and carries the act materially and other forms of causing

effects in the world around us, namely the production of material artefacts or meaningful (not

necessarily intelligible) signs that may be penetrated by others in communication, i.e. disclosed

through interpretation (not necessarily understood as intended by the acting agent).

This initial definition can be expanded through concepts of social action. Spanning from

Max Weber to more contemporary notions found in the work of Jrgen Habermas and Niklas

Luhmann, social action can be defined as acts that overtly social in their character, i.e. produce

effects in the form of objects, signs, texts and hypertexts, and that are communicable and therefore

disclosable by other actors, implying their reactions, bodily and discursive interactions, ranges of

partial agreement and disagreement, omission and reflection. The action emerges as social when our

acts and their effects are related to the acts and effects of other people as part of our acting together

in the spatial context of the place and between places, both simultaneously and in sequences of

time, frequently with repercussions beyond the spatiotemporal situation of the actors at the moment

of acting.

The notion of practice, for its part, traverses philosophy and social science, to encompass

the idea of praxis as the whole of human action, involving mental and bodily activity alike and

including our modes of understanding things and our emotional states. It also involves the

routinization of acting through culturally defined norms the nexus of doings and sayings

(Schatzky, 1996). My interpretation takes social practice to be collective in kind, constituted by the

interaction in both the presence and absence of bodies, and focuses on the moment of our

interaction, when the effects of what we do become part of what other actors do or will do. This isalso the moment of the production of social practice that take the form of communication, whether

these are semiotic, practical or material, surrounding even the artefacts we produce and exchange.

It is from the construction of social practice that I derive my use of the term association.

The word is generally used to describe the association between actors. However I prefer to use the

term to describe the transition from the individual act to social action via communication, an

exchange mediated by symbols that permeate even instrumental and economic exchanges. Hence

my emphasis on the practices of association. Naturally practice cannot be isolated as a unit nor

abstracted from its social dimension. Reckwitz (2002) reminds us that to say that practices are

social practices is indeed a tautology. However this view, accurate as it seems, runs the risk of


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assuming the social condition of practice as something given, unproblematic, and of obscuring

precisely what needs to be clarified: namely, how this social character is constructed. If we imagine

what we need to do to make our acts social through the constant efforts of interaction and

mutual understanding made during our communicative and material exchanges across space,

frequently involving different places and relating past actions and those happening in the present

and future we can see that this process is incredibly difficult to produce. The emphasis on

association is a means of evoking something that we take for granted in our social experience: the

laborious construction of momentary relations between acts, which lead to a tremendously complex

system of actions a construction subject to tension and divergence at every moment, in each

interaction.

What can we say about space in this largely invisible and subtle construction of social

practice? Not coincidentally, the role of space in association processes as a problem of

communication has been underestimated in social theory just as much as association has been an

underestimated theme in spatial approaches. Giddens (1984), for instance, reduces it to a system of

interaction whose production and actual ramifications are assumed more than explained. More

detailed spatial approaches to association tend to be restricted to material exchanges in the

economy.. Indeed even the recent approaches to the materiality of communication tend to focus on

its technological aspects, forgetting, in particular, to acknowledge how much our everyday

communication depends on the infrastructural level of meaning and the specific materiality of

cities. We shall see that the lack of attention paid to the conditions of association has led theory to

overlook its dependence on the materiality of space, and fail to trace the paths taken by association

between our acts and in recognizing its centrality as the flux of social reproduction. I therefore

propose refocusing our attention on the communicative conditions of associations in everyday life

and to the role of space in these associations. I am talking of the possibility of the production of an

urbanized space not being just a contingency but of encapsulating in itself an essential condition of

the association of our acts and the production of the immense and elusive matrix of social practice .

Space as a means to associationHow can space clarify the way in which practice is produced and socialized? Approximating

association to space is not a trivial problem. We need to comprehend the place that space occupies

in the associative process itself in other words, examine both the nature of space and the nature of

the social act, as well as the moment of association. One of the effects of communication is the

relative coordination of our acts: acts of mutual understanding relate our actions and combine

individual acts in complexes of interaction (Habermas, 1984). The social act is ambiguous by

nature: it is part of the actors contextualized intentions (conscious or unconscious) and experience;

and it has effects, outcomes or consequences (intentional or otherwise) that extend beyond its own

duration and that propagate beyond the context in which it was made potentially connecting with


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the acts of other actors in other places. Hence our acts have effects beyond their spatial horizon (the

borders of the place and the architectural space) and their temporal horizon (the duration of the

social event situated in the place). Acts linked in the form of communication can potentially extend

and resonate beyond such borders.

Can we find a similar ambiguity in space itself namely, the ambiguity of situating events

as context of our acts, and constituting the connection between them? Were we able to locate this

ambiguity, it might prove to be a point of contact between act and space. This aim in mind, we

would have to locate a role of space beyond the situation or background of acts, in the transition

between its context, in its ramifications with the acts occurring in other places, forming chains of

associations through distance and time into wider social landscapes simultaneously in the future

and elsewhere in the past: space as contextand as a connectionof practices.

We can begin with the first role, context. How is the space that we produce in the form of

the city capable of defining the context of our everyday interactions? How is it capable of mediating

our face-to-face associations? We need a concept of space capable of recognizing it as part of what

Giddens calls the reciprocity of interaction, the communication and mutual interpretations

between the participants of a social situation. The second role, connection, could only be asserted

if space constituted the connection between social situations and practices occurring in different

places (or moments) and if it constituted such connections inherently. As these connections are

produced through communicative exchanges, this role could only be viable were space part of the

contents of these exchanges the informational and interpretative contents produced by our acts

and exchanged during our interactions.Were this the case, the spaces of the city could find a place

in the associations that eventually produce the elusive trajectories of practice.

However space is a phenomenon defined by a visible and durable materiality. So how can

it be part of the informational contexts of the interaction? Or, conversely, how can apparently

immaterial social contents be present in space?

Space as social information

The presence of social contents in space, intriguing and improbable as it may seem, is in fact acommon idea. Indeed perhaps it is the only idea in commonamong sociospatial theories perhaps

almost all that they do share. But confusion and divergence exist concerning whatthese contents are

and wherethey are manifested or located in space. The following questions need to be investigated

then: what and where are the social of space? We can start with a basic element of urban space:

the space constructed by architecture. I begin by identifying three instances of space where the

social could be expressed all of them recognized by different theoretical traditions.

(a)Thephysical spaceof architectural structures the compartmentalization and sequences

of spaces inside buildings. If something of the social is present in physical space, it should

include the layout of the building and its compartments and their distribution. In fact this presumed


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presence is found at the centre of architectural practice in which architects design built structures in

apparently specific ways for each social activity. Theories of the form-function relation extol this

element. The sequences and forms of the compartments would retain some kind of organizational

logic, a specific projection of the activitys organization and nature. Hence this physical structure

could contain traces of the social embedded within it. But what would the extent of this projection

be? This relation would not be a homology an isomorphic relation between the structure of the

activity and the physical structure of its architectural space. First, even imagining that we can

isolate a teleological thread in any given activity (that is, a predetermined flow and end, as

frequently assumed in the reduction of human activity to the notion of function), we have to

recognize that activities can possess variable internal actions and interactions, which may unfold in

entirely distinct directions. The discipline and practice of architecture was historically constructed

around the possibility of finding this functional thread of activities, assuming a rigidity in the flow

of social practice that simply cannot be the case. The possibility of variation and randomness may

even be the very core of an activity.1

On the other hand, the fact that many buildings are converted to other kinds without any

substantial change to their physical structure shows that the same structure may contain the codes of

different activities (the relations between the parties involved in the activity, or between actors

taking part in it, including the order and location of the encounters and interactions within the

building). If the same building can support different activities, then we need to recognize that traces

of the social in the spatiality of architecture are not always sufficiently specific.For all practical

purposes, not only do buildings retain little specific social information on relational patterns

between the actions taking place within the activity, or between the actors who perform them: the

activities in themselves tend to leave too many generic traits in space for the latter to express them

unequivocally. Also, the physical nature of the space does not reveal the kind of informational

exchanges that occur within it. And it is precisely here that we reach the limits of the physical space

of the building as an absorption and projection of social information. For space to be able to retain

specific social information, it needs to be more differentiated. We must look for a dimension of a

space capable of retaining traces of the meanings produced by practice and exchanged incommunication. We do not need to go far.

(b) We may now move from the configurationto form and the visualityof architecture, still

in relation to the physical dimension of space. Here we encounter the possibility of social

information embedded in the architectural signs, read in the very form (especially the external form)

of the building what we could call a semiotic space as an expression of social meanings,

something recognized since J-F. Blondel and Goethe as character and more recently in Rowe

(1982), Norberg-Schulz (1980) and in Veselys (1987) notion of representational architecture (see

1 The idea of randomness is naturally opposed to the idea of teleology. This possibility is problematized in studies of

spaces of creativity and innovation, which have identified precisely the need to intensify the randomness of encounters as

a factor in the diversity of communicative exchanges (see Penn et al., 1999); Moultrie et al., 2007).


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Forty, 2000). The capacity of the visual signs of architecture to capture the nature of the activity

manifested within is, however, very limited. We cannot necessarily differentiate whether a glass

facade belongs to a bank, or an office block, or a company. Even given their strong presence in our

daily lives, providing information on numerous aspects of the activities surrounding us in the city,

architectural signs lack sufficiently precise connotative power to represent the specific nature of the

practices and informational exchanges hosted by their buildings. If there is a richer informational

relation between practice and space, therefore, it must be present beyond its physicality albeit still

associated with it.

(c) We have seen that for it to possess a role in association, space must be capable of

assuming more specific and complex meanings, closer to the degree of specificity that our acts and

interactions are capable of producing and transmitting. But how can space achieve this degree of

definition as social information? For this to be possible, the informational constitution of social

practice must include the appropriation of space: the moment when practice emerges and is

spatially situated. We may devise such an idea from Wittgensteins (1953) theory of meaning. We

may recognize the nature of the activity in the traces and artefacts left by our acts, and identify in

these traces the meanings attributed to them by our performative acts themselves. As in the

linguistic communication of meanings, space tells us about the practices that it supports and

expresses. In this case, space not only representsthe activity: it is enactedand, as such, laden with

meanings produced during our actions and interactions. Meanings become inherently associated

with space as traces left in it by our acts. Hence the meanings read by people appropriating spaces

may be more specific. Associated with spaces, such meanings naturally lack the same precision as

those richly connotative meanings woven through language. But they do have the same

informational specificity as the nature of the practices performed there. We can call this

Wittgensteinian dimension of space semantic space: spaces mean as much as our acts, precisely

because they are performed, semanticized by our acts.

The proposition of a semantic role of space is supported by a notion that is well-known in

theories of language and speech from concepts of context in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel,

1967), theories of language (Searle, 1969), hermeneutics (Gadamer, 1977) and communicativeaction theory (Habermas, 1984) though originally without much elaboration of its spatiality: our

performative and discursive acts require contexts for them to be understood by other actors during

our interactions. Our phrases can only be fully comprehended if the people communicating with us

share the same interpretative background. We need to tune our interpretations to a shared context,

recognized by all the participants of the situation. In everyday communication a phrase is never

uttered in isolation: semantic contents exchanged between participants converge on the basis of the

context. As a participant in the interaction, the interpreter must enter the context of reference

(Habermas, 1987). This is where we can locate the role of the context and of the traces of meanings

enacted and read within it. The contexts meanings are used to constitute the semantic contents of


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the interaction. The context connects the more intrinsic and detailed components of the interaction

with wider properties of social practice (Giddens, 1984).

However in order to involve space as an active element in the association of practice, we

need to relate contexts to their spatiality: we need to recognize that contexts are spatially defined

through the borders of the places found in the city (architectures, open spaces, streets, etc.). The

idea of context is today widespread in geography and other disciplines involving spatial studies

(e.g. Simonsen, 1991; Thrift, 1996), but without explicit relation to communication or to the

associative processes of practice. Nevertheless, we may construct this relation observing the role of

space in the definition of social situations. Goffmans (1961) concept of region as a place defined

by borders, developed upon Wright and Barkers concept of behavioural setting where mutual

expectations are associated with places, certainly offer us means to do so. We can note that our

endeavours to comprehend the intentions and behaviours of other actors are facilitated by our

recognition of the place and its space as defined for the purpose in question. Space has the

contextual role of establishing the conditions of communication: by crossing the borders of an

architectonic space or an urban place, a new context is immediately absorbed by our cognition as a

kind of interpretive background, shared by the participants of the situation. Thereafter the relations

between space and the acts of mutual understanding and communication unfold in moments of

association, still circumscribed to the place:

(1) Crossing the borders of the place involves the stimulus to attend to the new context andsocial situation, clearly establishing the need for recognition of the new codes of interaction

and of the mutual expectations of behaviour. The context is spatially and cognitively

defined: it comes to be assumed by the participants of the social situation as the place itself.

(2) Space therefore has the potential to reduce the need to define or redefine a shared context(discursively, through observation or memory) and has effects on the fluidity of the

interaction,. This contextual role of space implies the reduction of the risks of noise in

communication.

(3) Hence by supporting the interpretations of meanings exchanged in communication, themeanings of urban and architectural spaces become active semantic resources in the

production of our interactions and their complex connotative contents. Performative and

communicative acts may involve the semantic dimension of space as much as its sensory

dimension.

(4) Space can, therefore, become an active part of the unfolding of individual acts intocommunicative associations within the place.


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We have seen that space can only be completely intrinsic to the social if it possesses an active role

in communication. Only the semantic density produced by our own practices in space would be

enough to allow it to anchor our interpretations and interactions contextually.

This argument finally enables us to expand the role of space in association. Here we need to

abandon the Kantian vision of immanent essences and stable contents contained in space as a

category of experience in order to recognize a semantic relation produced in space by practice itself.

Interestingly the observation of traces of meanings enacted in space and able to support

communication originates in Wittgensteins idea that meanings cannot be simply attributed to

things, but are enacted in our practices an idea expanded through theories of context, language

and speech. It is this form of producing meanings that may ensure a profound role for space in the

social construction of practice itself:in this view, space becomes part not only of the act of each

actor but also of the association of acts of different actors and does so upon architecture and place.

If the theories on the importance of contexts for communication are correct, and if contexts can

indeed by associated with places and spatial borders, we can recognize that, by sustaining our

interpretations, contextual space can affect the course of our communications. It helps actively

define the paths that our acts and interactions take within social situations, not only as a support and

physical scenario, but as a medium for the input of information in the communicative connections

between our acts.

We have seen the consideration of architectural and urban spaces as an informational

support for our acts and their connections at the level of social situations. However the role of space

does not cease at the physical and temporal borders of the social situation: while space is a

contextual part of interaction, space can also be active in associations beyond these borders. To

perceive this active presence of space as a mediator for interactions across distance, a role usually

reserved for language or communication technologies, we need to understand how space forms part

of the webs of communicative exchanges between actors, or how space can connect acts happening

in different places and moments. What property would allow space to become part of the

connectivity of the practice and production of systems of interactions that constitute socialities?

Between act and space: meaning as reference and connection

We need a concept capable of capturing the bridge that links acts to space, allowing us to ascertain

the apparently endless connectivity between acts see why acts connect with each other and how

space is involved in these connections. More to the point, if we wish to fully apprehend the role of

space in the connectivity of practice, we need to show how this mediation of space is inevitable, a

necessity of practice itself. This is, naturally, an inference that is at once robust and risky. We need

to examine the question carefully, therefore.

The connections between acts and spaces have recently been explored as a field of inherent

relationality, in the form of the effects produced by semiotic networks of actors, objects and hybrid


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entities, in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) developed by Latour (1999, 2004) and others. Their

theory follows on from earlier post-structuralist approaches and their anti-humanist critiques of the

rational subject based on Deleuze, Foucault and others. ANT shares some points in common with

non-representational approaches, as Thrift (2008) calls them, and performative approaches, as

expounded by Schechner (1988) and Butler (1997): the view of the subject immersed in a push to

practice and thought in action, emphasizing the situated, pre-linguistic and embodied states that

give intelligibility (not necessarily meaning) to human action (Thrift, 1996:6). These theories

emphasize the idea that actors and objects are forged in a multiplicity of actions and interactions.

They centre on the external rather than the internal dimension of symbolic meanings typical of

representational models of the world. In ANT, especially, the heterogeneities and physical borders

between things are dissolved cast into the fire of the dualisms that shape our understanding of

reality (Law, 1999).

We can certainly agree on the need to avoid fixing borders in the relations between subjects

and objects, and on the importance of the between-ness of collective action and of an inherent

relationality between humans and non-humans. Any approach to the relations between practice and

space must indeed overcome the artificial dualisms between actors, artefacts and built environment.

However we must also avoid the excesses of ignoring the material differences between things like

those between spaces and actions for a simple reason: such differences may be an active part of

their relation. The spatiality of our cities and above all the heterogeneity of urban form (the

differences between spaces) may have close relations to and effects on our practices, appropriations

and forms of acting collectively, as emphasized by other theories from economics to Marxist

approaches in geography. In relation to agency, meanwhile, we must also avoid reducing the actor

to a mere network effect if our aim is to reaffirm the capacity of actors to overcome the

limitations of their own contexts through their actions. Hence I insist on the need for an approach

capable of recognizing the importance of both material heterogeneity and the heterogeneity of

acting subjects, such that we are really capable of identifying the role of the materiality of space in

the association of our actions.

Here we touch on a key point. We need to describe a property that produces connectivitybetween things one able to bring to the forefront space with its intrinsic qualities, which

differentiate it from any other thing a quite distinct view of relationality indeed. Steps into such

property may be found already in Husserls (1976) definitions of indication (signs that have an

external relation to other object by a process of association) and reference (the power of an

expression to relate itself to an objectivity of some sort, via meaning) (Drummond, 2007).

Interestingly, Harmans (2002) recent analysis of the ontological condition of tools addresses this

property as referentiality. Interpreting Heidegger (Husserls student), Harman associates being

and meaning of the tool as one and the same, and recalls the problem of defining entities as a

central dispute in the history of philosophy a conflict which Rorty sees as between atomist and


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holism: the assumption that there can be entities which are what they are totally independent of all

relations between them, and the assumption that all entities are nodes in a set of relations (Rorty in

Harman, 2002:166). Heideggers definition of a relational totality as the structure of the world

clearly relates to the second type of entities: World [...] is not an independent void or projective

screen standing at a distance from beings; it is the referential contexture in which these beings

themselves are stationed, and which they alone enact (Harman, 2002:27). Tools express such

property with tremendous clarity. Tools vanish into something beyond itself. The meaning of

the tool is the visible termination of its underground action. The meaning of equipment is

determined by that for the sake of which it acts [...] Tools execute for the sake of [ Worumwillen]

reference, not because people run across them, but because they are utterly determinate in their

referential function that is, because they already stand at the mercy of innumerable terminal points

of meaning (Harman, 2002:29). Harman defines reference as part of an ambiguity of meaning.

My own interpretation of meaning also has strong convergences with Luhmanns (1995)

self-referentiality. The meaning of something is a strongly referential construction: its identity

and meaning only emerge in relation to other objects and meanings in an endless chain of meaning.

In fact, meaning has a duality: it is an event in our experienceand also an experience of reference.

The meaning of something objects, what we do or make, the places we inhabit is perceived as a

presence within our perceptual field: it is also captured as information that defines its meaning in

our cognition. However the construction of the meaning of this thing is never contained in its

essence alone, but in associations in our practice and our relations with other objects in our

perception.

We are now able to include space as the material counterpart of practices as part of such

referential construction. We know that the relation between acts is above all a social requirement:

the material and informational reproduction of a society requires continuity and the momentary

binding of the acts of different actors. The infrastructures of these interactions, even those that are

instrumental in kind, acquire semantic pathways: they are constituted as communicative exchanges.

Communication is always mediated by the transmission of information and meaning (Luhmann,

1995). The continuity and binding of acts is also a kind of effect of the act itself: acting implies thatsomething changes in the world (Habermas, 1984) invoking reactions and new acts. We also

know that space offers the material support for us to act, frequently involving our face-to-face

interaction in architectural and city spaces. But as we have seen too, this is not all that space does.

Space has cognitive roles: it absorbs and projects traces of social information relating to the actions

that it sustains from the visual information of the faades and the information provided to our

movements by the layout of the place or building, to the rich information produced within space by

practice itself. These roles have been defined as informational dimensions, physical, semiotic and

semantic, of architectonic and urban space.


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Could these latent meanings in space feed practice and become the bridge that links acts

to space, and through space, acts between themselves? How could meaning have such role and

property? Generally we understand the meaning of something as its signification or identity.

However the meaning of a thing depends on its relation to other things and to their own meanings.

For example, the meaning of the object residential building is defined by its relation to the act of

dwelling or inhabiting. This specificity differentiates it from other types of building. The act of

inhabiting is also defined by a series of other meanings and acts, such as protection, shelter,

conviviality and so on, and these by new chains of relations.2

This renewed concept of meaning may be explored as a form of re-interpreting the relations

between things that we produce in the world around us, while maintaining active the experience of

the identities of things. This idea allows us to recognize differences of materialityas key factors in

the relation between practice and space. Referential meaning is constituted by crossing the borders

of different things without ignoring their inherent material qualities. It operates rather by

recognizing these qualities defining itself through them, reaffirming their specificities in our

cognition, at the same time as it affirms their identity, defined referentially. I suggest that this

connection is a central aspect of what we have seen called, in recent approaches such as ANT,

inherent relationality in social and physical reality but in a way entirely distinct from the

abolition of material differences and the borders between things proposed by ANT.

We can finally expand the Wittgensteinian concept of meaning as a construction of practice

to include the property of meaning as connection: the meaning of something can only be defined by

its connections with other acts, objects, words and spaces. In this endless chain of references

constituted in our practices and cognition, we can explicitly include the space of the city. Based on

the essential connection of meaning, we can perceive space mediating acts in situations in different

places within the same city or beyond a connection which is in fact multiple, perhaps the only

intrinsic connection between things as distinct as our acts and spaces.

The referentiality of meaning effectively reaffirms spaces unique materiality as the quality

defining its equally unique role as a medium of association a different medium to all other media,

such as language or communication technologies. This ontological place of space in association isonly distinguishable theoretically simply because practice does not occur free of space, its

extension, form and meaning, and because space demands our appropriation for it to be imbued

with meaning. This involves a form of elusive connection between act and space in the meaning

shared by them, a connection that occurs when we enact the spaces around us. As we shall see, this

occurs at the precise moment when the meaning of a place is recognized, as well as during

appropriation and communication in these spaces. And it remains active when we relate what

2This idea recalls Giddenss (1984) argument that a house is only understood as such if the observer recognizes the object

as a place of habitation with a field of properties specified by its modes of use in human activity.


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understand that these heterogeneities take the form of a partially recognizable, intelligible structure

in the form of centralities or areas of different accessibilities.

More crucially we intuitively understand the reasons that animate the very process

producing heterogeneities in the space of the city. We understand the ways in which the our

movement and path choices form an active part of this process, such as finding certain kinds of

activities along some routes and in some areas more than others.3 This kind of pre-discursive

knowledge animates our practices and confers them an a priori spatiality at the very moment of

intending (frequently unconsciously and pre-discursively) the act to be performed a spatiality

active even in our imagination. This is a profound form of knowledge of the material requirements

for our interactions to occur: a recognition that urban spatialities possess key properties for our

acting and for the transition from individual to social act. Places and built forms, components of the

urban environment, are materially and semantically differentiated. They are point of reference that

contain properties of the events to which they provide support. This referential function of space is

fundamental to our practices: the appropriation of urban space as cognitively structured

informationhelps us to enact socially (cf. Haken and Portugali, 2003).

Now we may devise a key point of my argument. Space is produced and appropriated as a

referential contexture for performative acts: it comprises information on practices and possibilities

for practices. Already at the scale of the city, space is a network of units of social information a

form of the presentation of the social world to itself. Such constellation of reference and topoiof

practices seems vital both to the recursive aspect of these practices, enabling the continuation of

interactions and thestability of the relationships between actors as traces of social organization, and

to the randomness of interactions. Randomness brings about interactions that inject novelty into a

social system, including new relationships. From the actors viewpoint, therefore, things that

constitute a social world (everyday activities, the existence of differentiated actors) are known by

means of urban space as social information. Space becomes a way for us to gradually unveil the

social world through contacts with distinct modes of practice and behaviour in different social

situations. The knowledge of acting collectively is not constructed consciously, nor taught

discursively: it is enacted during our social experiences in the city. This leads us to the next item:As actors, we access and appropriate urban spaces as a way of implicating our acts with

other acts materialized in these spaces. Here, there seems to be an overlooked but key fact:

differentiated spaces are the loci of differentiated practices.4The heterogeneity of urban space

renders the distribution of social activities intelligible in the form of recognizable patterns of

accessibility, location and density (usually a subject in urban studies and spatial economics),

3A number of traditions exist that highlight the relations between the localization of activities and the patterns of urban

structuration, such as spatial economics and urban configurational studies, spanning from Hansen (1959) to Goffette-

Nagot (2000).4This observation refers to any culture whose division of labour is manifested spatially. See Massey (1984) for a

description of the spatial division of labour in capitalist society, and Hillier and Hanson (1984) for anthropological

descriptions of non-urban spatial cultures.


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enabling us to increase the connectivity of our actions. In temporal terms, acts also imply earlier

acts, which allow us to use their outcomes, just as our own acts produce outcomes that will be used

in other places or transmitted to them. These implicated actions form courses of action in webs

whose knots are spatio-temporal situations of encounter and exchange between actors in different

places of a city and in other cities. The outcomes of our acts can therefore be accessed in other

places were actors can intervene, thereby generating new acts and outcomes that can then be taken

to other places and so on. Buildings, places and locations assume the role of knots in the

association of acts, such as looking for a service in a particular street of the city and becoming

involved in exchanges there, or accessing the workplace to perform activities in cooperation with

others, or socializing with friends in a bar or a park.

Here we reach a key moment in the emergence of practice as social. The citys spaces

connect with the actions of different participants and thereby take on a fundamental role in the

combination of individual acts in complexes of interaction. Seen through the prism of society, the

elusive unfolding and ramifications of social acts5are anchored momentarily as successive spatial

knots in the form of activities and their localizations. These webs are mediated by threads of

meaning constituted by the references between acts and spaces. The referentiality of meanings

becomes fundamental for the production of networks of practice, arranged, accessed and related

through city spaces. Or in other words, if meaning is referential, and if space assumes meanings,

then space may be part of the webs of reference embedded in actions, their meanings and their

effects.

This is the moment of a growing association and emergence of systems of interaction

through referential space. The importance of this level of everyday relations cannot be stressed

enough: it is there at the very core of social reproduction. As a material and semantic field, the city

assumes a central practical and cognitive role in the relation between actors and in the structuring

and constant change of the social world a role, I therefore suggest, not dissimilar to and as

important as that of language.

Instead of a conclusion: could association shape space itself?By employing a concept of referential space, we can consider space as endogenous to practice, and

our practices as continually impregnated with space. This concept posits meaning as a connection

between the social and the spatial, and space as a material medium for the production of systems of

interaction. Urban space seems vital to the transition from individual acts to social action

5Associations through performative and discursive acts and the diffusion and appropriation of their outcomes form the

networks of interaction that constitute the volatile structures of the social world. This vision of societies as an effect of

communication emphasizes the production of structures as communicative processes. Systems that only consist ofautopoietically produced events, that is, they only last when and as long as connective events can be produced as

recursive networks (Luhmann 1998:56). Networks of acts and their effects occur within institutionalized channels of

organizing practice, also supported by technical communication and information processing systems.


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mediated by meanings. This transition is the first level of a relation between practice and space: the

proposition of a role of the space of the city in association as a communicative achievement.

And what of the contrary? Has practice anything to do with the form in which we produce

space and urban spaces in particular? In fact the proposition of an inherent relation between

practice and spacethrough shared meanings can only be complete if we consider a space produced

so as to be a part of practice. The semantic and material structuration of cities must be inherently

related to the communicative and material requirements of association. Such an idea would have at

least two implications: (a) association must be an active condition in the production of space, like a

force generating material structures in the form of the city; (b) urban spatialities would be produced

as a constellation of social references that are accessible, interpretable and appropriable by actors in

their acts. The form of urban space is generated and progressively transformed as an expression of

the connectivity of social practice, an expression of the semantic references and material

implications between acts, and an expression of the impulse to interactionthat generates socialities.

In other words, the intense and diverse association of practice involves the cognitive and physical

differentiation of space in the form of cities. Changes in systems of interactions would generate

tensions in its systems of spaces, and vice-versa.

These implications may be certainly controversial and need to be more adequately explored.

We find interesting evidence that there is, in fact, a relation between a particular sphere of practice

work and production and urban structures in of economic geography. From Alfred Weber to

Paul Krugman, the city was defined as a response to the problem of economic interaction and the

possibility of a total dispersal of economic units over the landscape. If this is true, we can relate this

argument to the internal formations of the city and suggest a continuity between these processes: the

extension of the logic of distance found in economic geography to the interior of cities. The problem

of distance is not suspended once we find ourselves within intraurban space: competition for

location appears to shape urban structure from within too.

The extension of this logic of space would be similarly repeated in the logic of practice. The

effects of the production of urban structures capable of minimizing distances between potentially

interactive actors cannot be limited to a single sphere of practice: the relational effects of urbanspace on actions necessarily go beyond economic action to enable, mediate and connect every

type of action and interaction, even the non-instrumental.

Can also consider that different formations of these spaces entail different potential effects

on the inherently mutual and relational character of acts? Recent evidences of how spatially dense

environments may foster face-to-face interaction and communication has been brought about by

approaches in urban economics (Glaeser et al, 1992; Gordon and Ikeda, 2011) and social physics

(Bettencourt, 2013). Although such studies may allow us to think that the different formations

found in cities from centralities to areas of difficult to access or distant streets can intensify or

limit possibilities for the transition from individual to social acts, we need now a proper account of


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the social implications at play. My personal hypothesis is that the association of practice involves

the production of spatial formations deeply embedded in the very materiality of the urban as a

material condition for the emergence of communication mediated by the body. Urban spatialities

would have the effect of stimulating (or controlling) the possibilities for communication, so as to

include levels of both contingencyand causalitynecessary to the generation of encounters and the

reproduction of bonds and socialities. These inferences allow us to consider space as a form of

structuring informational and communicative networks in which socialities are immersed; a space

produced to mediate and connect practices in social constructions just as extensively as language; a

referential substrate that provides organization and contingency, structure and surprise to

communications in which social relations unfold. This semanticized space indicates that space has

participated in the transition from the act in itself to social action.

The present approach is not a proposition of a new ontology far from it. It is an approach

developed very much like sewing, that is, from withinand betweenexisting approaches, tying and

expanding concepts rather than searching for the next turn. This option allowed us to shed light

on connections assumed as inherent relationality, here reinterpreted as referentiality expressed

through the ambiguity of meaning and able to incorporate the acting subject as a creator of signs,

fluxes and networks; and to capturespatial traces of the relations between our acts:traces active at

the precise moment of association, constituting the very possibility of any association; traces

produced through the relation between communication and space. By addressing these traces, the

objectives of an approach centred on the communicative processes of association can be set out as

follows: to propose space as a material and semantic foundation to the communicability of practice,

and to elucidate one of its roles in social reproduction by showing referential space to be a medium

for association.

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