Any attempt to use such codes as a means of deciphering social space must surely reduce that space itself to the status of a message, and the inhabiting of it to the status of a reading.
A sought-for science of space:
- Represents the political use of knowledge…
- Implies an ideology designed to conceal that use…
- Embodies at best a technological utopia, a sort of computer simulation of the future.
…the aim is to discover or construct a theoretical unity between ‘fields’ which are apprehended seperately, just as molecular, electromagnetic and gravitational forces are in physics. The fields we are concerned with are, first, the physical - nature, the Cosmosl secondly, the mental, including logical and formal abstractions; and, thirdly, the social. In other words, we are concerned with the logico-epistemological space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias.
The fact remains that an already produced space can be decoded, can be read.