When Space Becomes Self-Evident
What does a room retain of space when no one is in it?
The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the distances, and the things placed within it. The distance between two walls can be measured, the position of objects can be recorded, and the dimensions of the room can be drawn on a plan. Yet those same distances can become proximity and remoteness, possibility and obstruction, path and enclosure in another encounter. Nothing in the geometry of the room has changed; what has changed is the way in which it is present.
Which of these is space?
What is measured?
What is experienced?
Or something that remains between the two?
Space is often accepted as self-evident before it becomes a question: a ground within which things are situated and movement becomes possible. As though something called space already exists, and experience is merely one way of accessing it.
But what if what is experienced is not the whole of space?
And if space is not simply what we occupy, how should the relation between existing space and experienced space be understood?
Descartes thinks the body through extension and articulates the material world through its geometrical determination. Within such a horizon, space is less a quality of experience than a condition for the determination of extended things.
But is space only what things occupy?
Newton gives the independence of space another formulation. Absolute space can be conceived as independent of the objects situated within it; even if objects disappear, space can remain.
Leibniz does not accept this independence. For him, space is not an independent entity but an order formed through relations among beings. Without beings and their relations, speaking of space loses its meaning.
Within this opposition, space stands between two possibilities: something independent of relation, or an order emerging from relations.
If space is independent, does it not become a container into which things are merely placed?
And if space is nothing other than an order of relations, does space itself disappear into the relations that define it?
Kant formulates the opposition at another level. Space is neither an object alongside other objects nor merely a set of relations among them; it is the form of outer intuition and one of the conditions for the possibility of experiencing the external world.
Space, then, enters into the possibility of experiencing an outside before it becomes an object of experience.
But this dependence leaves another question. If space is one of the conditions under which the external world becomes possible for human experience, can what we call “space” also be thought independently of these conditions?
If not, space remains within the horizon of human experience.
If so, what does it mean to speak of a space that existed before any human experience of it?
Heidegger places the relation between human beings and the world at a distance from the simple opposition between subject and object. The world is disclosed through being-in-the-world before it is a collection of objects standing before a subject. Things, too, are present before they become objects of observation, embedded instead in a network of engagements and possibilities for action.
Distance, within such a world, is not merely the distance between two points. It can become proximity and remoteness, possibility and obstruction, path and rupture. A given geometrical distance can take on different qualities of presence within different relations.
Space, then, is neither merely extension nor merely what appears in perception.
But if space is disclosed through being-in-the-world, does something remain outside this disclosure?
Latour extends the field of relation by removing the human being from the position of the sole determining agent of the state of the world. Things, tools, materials, technologies, and nonhuman beings also enter into the formation of situations and exert effects within the relations that emerge among them.
Space, in this sense, cannot be regarded simply as a product of human experience.
But if every spatial situation takes shape within a network of actions and relations, can space be reduced to the sum of these relations?
Is space something that takes shape in relation?
Or is it something within which relation takes place?
The boundary between these two remains unclear.
Meillassoux takes the question of reality independent of the human being to a time when there was no human being to experience it. The Earth, the stars, and cosmic events existed before the emergence of humanity. Their reality cannot be dependent entirely upon an experience that did not yet exist.
But if the world existed before humanity, what was the status of its space?
Did space also exist before humanity?
And if it did, how can its independence be thought without placing it once again within the conditions of human access?
The issue shifts here from the experience of space to the very possibility of the existence of space independently of experience, without that independence necessarily becoming a space hidden behind experience.
Harman radicalizes this independence at the level of the object and relation. No relation necessarily contains a being in its entirety. What becomes present within a relation is not necessarily everything that the being is.
This distinction also has consequences for space.
Space can become manifest in experience without being reducible to experience.
It can take shape in relations among beings without being entirely identical with those relations.
It can exist independently of the human being without becoming something outside every possibility of thought.
Space, then, is neither merely geometrical extension, nor merely an order of relations, nor only a condition of experience, nor only the product of experience.
Each of these forms discloses something and, at the same time, leaves something outside itself.
What we experience is space; but is it the whole of space?
What takes place among beings is a spatial condition; but does space end with these relations?
What existed before humanity may have been spatial; but can it be thought without returning it to the horizon of human experience?
Space reveals a form of itself within each of these relations without necessarily being exhausted by that form.
From this perspective, the problem of space is no longer simply a matter of finding a more precise definition of it. The very definition that reduces space to extension, relation, experience, or perception becomes part of the problem.
If space is more than any of these forms, this “more” is not necessarily something hidden behind them, nor a reality that can be possessed through more precise access.
It is simply something that remains without ever becoming fully present in any of these forms.
Perhaps the question of space begins with this distance:
If what we experience of space is not everything that space is, what remains within this distance?
And if no single form can contain space in its entirety, is space itself anything other than what, each time, allows itself to appear within an encounter, a relation, or an experience?
The question remains open; not in order to seek another space behind what we experience, but to ask about that which becomes present in every spatial configuration and yet is never exhausted by it.