Spaces' Significance as Ruin of Their Signification: From Space to Theory and Back Again

At this point I am concerned with where spatial turns into theoretical as part of the process of applying institutional ethnography to the field of international art biennials. Possibly the whole enterprise hinges on the alienation of the gaze at the same time as suspension of the natural attitude towards words as much as towards pictures.

The structuralist rending asunder of the signifiers and their signifieds should apply to the extent to the spatial signifiers and their spatial signifieds. That's where probably the attempts at founding semiotics of space founder under the weight of their own unrealizable assumptions about the significatory potential of reading spaces as if they were elements of a certain kind of langue as opposed to parole of actual physical existence of urban spaces.

The bad infinity of possible meanings that can possibly accrue to any element of such spatial language has apparently drowned out the structural regularity of spatial configurations that continue to maintain their coherense across times and spaces. However, rather than advocating a revival of some sort of structuralist paradigm, which has never lost its significance and force to rupture many a received idea, I have in mind Deleuze and Guattari's project as extension of the initial attempts to theorize structure in directions of thought that can combine material, social, and discursive into abstract configurations that are capable of neither losing the actual regularities out sight nor falling into reductivist trap of meaning as the sole order of revelance to research into what spaces do.

Spaces can be ascribed agential capacities to the extent that they participate in the relations of ruling that in their totality produce the field of power upon which spatial configurations map in the analytic account of their significance. Therefore, the study of the production of space can recover significance of spaces out of the ruins of their signification.

And that goes beyond the efforts at cultural mapping that one may undertake vis-a-vis spatial artifacts towards the recognition of importance that numerous discursive associations, appropriations, and accretions have for adequate rendering what a structure given to urban space holds in stock for ethnographer of spaces.