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EDWARD SOJA AND THE POETICS OF DECENTERING

Bertrand Westphal

Is Edward William Soja well known in France? There is some doubt. Yet as the
author of three essays
1
exploring contemporary urban structure, he grounded Anglo-
Saxon cultural geography firmly in postmodern debate, making it highly politicized at
the same time. In his first essay, Postmodern Geographies (1989), Soja maintains
that reconstituted critical human geography is required for exploited workers,
tyrannized people and dominated women. It must be particularly attuned to
contemporary restructuring processes if it is to contribute to a radical postmodernism
of resistance. French geographers (Americanophiles) fell in line with this self-willed
approach, but beyond that
Beyond that, not too much is happening. I recently saw his name mentioned in an
article on comparative literature, nothing more. Thats very little and thats a shame.
Perhaps I havent looked hard enough and the major references to Soja in France
have escaped my attention. As far as Im concerned, it was in a large book store on
Charing Cross Road, in London, as I was scouring the bookshelves to prepare an
essay on geocriticism, that I discovered Thirdspace (1996). This fortuitous but direct,
even physical, contact with the book inspired me a great deal more than poring over
lengthy bibliographical lists. Sojas book is highly seductive from a material
perspective from the moment you set eyes on it: the innovation and passion that
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1 Postmodern Geographies : The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London :Verso
Press 1989 ; Thirdspace : Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford :
Blackwell, 1996 ; Postmetropolis : Cultural Studies of Cities and Regions, Oxford : Blackwell, 2000.


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inspired it leaps out as you leaf through the pages, the books cover heralding
contents that are alternative, something radically new. The investment was definitely
a profitable one, and my initial impressions were confirmed as I read the book a few
months later, under the open skies of West Texas, where I was living, writing and
teaching while on sabbatical leave. Yes, Soja is one of those who know how to break
new ground, opening up the horizons of diverse worlds: in geography, urban studies,
philosophy, sociology and, of course, literature, even if in a roundabout way.

The relative silence shrouding Sojas work in France stems partially from the fact that
it has not been translated into French (whereas it was translated into Portuguese as
early as 1993). This lacuna in itself is a scientific anomaly, and corroborates other
tragic examples of how France has positioned itself as a kind of fortress that wants
to beor at least believes itself to beimpervious to all (or nearly all) that harks
from the Anglophone Westamong others. The most famous promoters of
postmodernism, specializing in Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Gender or
Gay/Lesbian Studies, and many others, have not received any greater recognition
than Soja in France. Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha were translated for the first
time in 2007although both are perhaps the main international authoritive voices in
postcolonial studies (feminist, in the case of Spivak); Fredric J ameson, a leading
postmodernist figure in the arts world, also had to wait until the crucial year of 2007
to cross the Atlantic and the Channel, although he had been translated into German
and Spanish for many years. Had the drawbridge finally been lowered? Would
France stop ostracizing a movement whose principal wrongdoing wasand the
suspicion is a legitimate oneto have been formalized outside of France, just as
baroque had been before it? (It took years for the mere word to be included in school
textbooks on French literature.) Lets hope so, for the circulation of ideas is
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remarkably lively in the opposite direction. Spivak, for example, translated J acques
Derridas De la Grammatologie into English as early as the 1970s ; it would be futile
to attempt to inventory even a succinct list of French cohorts whose texts were
translated into English and have served as an epistemological bedrock for Anglo-
Saxon theorists. Soja is no stranger to the process. He promoted Henri Lefebvres
works in the United States, notably one of his masterpieces, La Production de
lespace (The Production of Space), published in English by Blackwell, a major
Oxford publisher, in 1991, the year of the Marxist philosopher and sociologists
death. As Soja maintains in Thirdspace, Lefebvre is categorically the most influential
specialist on social spacea deep voice that emanated from the sidelines. Sojas
modesty is substantial since one of the reasons why Lefebvres works have been
circulated much more widely in recent years has been Sojas self-willed role as relay.
And finally, lets not beat about the bush: Soja himself has become a leading
authority on everything concerning the analysis of the contemporary urban
phenomenon, the concomitant social injustices, and the burgeoning complexity
inherent in representing urban space, and space itself. Surfing the Web, I discovered
an article about spatial layout in Tetris and Myst, two popular video games whose
author (Benjamin Buckley) has adapted Sojas theories.

Sojas personal life predisposed him to focusing in depth on the citys impact on its
inhabitants social life. You cannot be born in the Bronx (in 1941) and grow up there
without being marked for life when you see the huge gap between the impoverished
outskirts and the decision-making center. You cannot live in Los Angeles (where
Soja teaches political geography and urban planning at UCLA) and remain
impervious to the centrifugal nature of the modern, hypermodern, even postmodern
city, or as he refers to it, of the postmetropolis. Sojas intimate knowledge of two
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American megalopoles has been invaluable. Thirdspace offers, as its subtitle
suggests, a journey to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. The crux
of the content is about Los Angeles, notably one of its counties: Orange, whose
toponym provides a fortuitous transition to another city under examination,
Amsterdam. Los Angeles is a very real place, rich in contrasts (Wonderland vs
Wasteland, according to Claire Rasmussen), where Hollywood stars coexist with
outcasts, that Rodney King subsumed from 1991 to 1992. Yet it is also an imaginary
site, built with representations of the collective imagination promoted in movies,
literature, myths, songs, etc. In a magnificent novel set in 1960s Los Angeles, Alison
Lurie depicts L.A. as The Nowhere City. Soja explores this fundamental nomadic
character throughout his work, because the Californian city is at opposite points of
the globe from the world of Pascal: it is a sphere whose center is nowhere, as Lurie
conceives it, and whose circumference is everywhere, a kind of artefact that is
virtually impossible to grasp, a bit like the futuristic mutants inhabiting the
postmetropolis of Blade Runneranother stock reference from the angeleno cultural
panorama. L.A. vida loca, LaLa Land: scads of word games play on the madness, a
spatial concept conveying a paradigm shift off the beaten track, the happy medium
abandoned. The ex-centricity of L.A. has been the subject of many studies, including
City of Quartz, an essay that, in 1990barely one year before the King affair and
therefore a kind of precursorbrought author Mike Davis overnight fame and record
sales in the United States.

For Soja, Los Angeles is the prototype of postmodern space, an absolute metaphor
for contemporary excess. Deprived of any real history (there were only ten thousand
or so inhabitants in the late 1880s), L.A. evolved in pure space, and it is exactly this
space that, according to Soja, becomes the main coordinate of social life. We are all
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spatial beings, inscribed in both space and time. Philosophy and human and social
sciences have given time and its narrative version, H/history, absolute primacy over
the centuriesat least until the modern erayet space has finally found its place, if I
may venture this far. We had to wait for the arrival of postmodernism and a less
monolithic interpretation of the world to be able to envisage these two dimensions of
our existence having equal play. Like Lefebvre before him, Gaston Bachelard, and
several German and Anglo-Saxon theorists, Soja crossed swords to promote
spatiality as a dimension of the human world, and the res urbana. This is good, but it
gets better. Its as if this spatial turn spearheaded a radical opening of the mind,
conveyed by the transcending of binary thinking expressed by an alternative yes/no
excluding the tertium quid, in other words, a third way. As I see it, Sojas theory is
fascinating because it constantly probes the interstices of yes and no, black and
white, center and periphery, same and other. Time is generally perceived in a
compact manner, homogenous, even if for some (and I am one of them), history is
based on a semantics of tempuscolitemporal archipelagos linked together using a
hierarchy that is variable and thus relative to point of view (notably ethnocentric)
whereas space appears heterogenous, opening onto the multiple, and conducive to
an infinity of perspectives. From this angle, Sojas Los Angeles is merely a
particularly striking illustration of a characteristic common to spaces the world over,
urban or not.

Space, in its radical heterogeneity, is scattered with zones that are mixed, double,
multiple and open that many have attempted to explore. These intermediary
spacesthird spaceswere explored by Lefebvre, the matre penser; by
Foucault (and his concept of heterotopy); by Serres (and his portiuncules), by
sociologists like J ean Rmy and J ean Viard; and by writers like Salman Rushdie and
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Gloria Anzaldua. Edward Soja pushed the idea further it seems. He was able to
focus on the extraordinary potential inherent in Thirdspace, a space for absolute
alterity (thirding-as-othering or trialectics), a space for the confrontation and
hybridization of identity, a space for the coupling of the imaginary and the real, and
most of all a space for transcending dualism and binary logic and thus a space for
co-existence, a shared area loath to all dividing lines. This journey in third space
marked me profoundly. Possibly because Soja hit a nerveone linked to origins: you
couldnt be Alsatian, as I am, without making your native region a natural third space
(based on a logic that Gloria Anzaldua applied to Texas). Definitely because Soja the
geographer implicitly offers the literary world conditions for a rapprochement
between the imaginary and the real and, by extension, the idea of opening up
literature and all artistic forms of representation, making them less peripheral and
more pivotal, releasing them from their ivory towers fostering the positivist
apportionment of knowledgein short, restoring what they once were from the time
of Ancient Greece to the Middle Ages: a key to deciphering and understanding the
world, the real world. If what is real gets closer to the imaginary, its because the
imaginary plays a role in the real. Los Angeles is a city that is real-and-
imagined/imaginary. Soja and Davis represent this one way, Alison Lurie another
way, Ridley Scott still another way. Which one is real, which is true? None, all at the
same time. The sociological and the geographic, the literary and the
cinematographic. And what holds true for the City of Angels is just as meaningful and
relevant elsewhere, everywhere where human beings have laid out their
environment based on mental projections, a dream fed by unbridled imagination. In
one of his essays, Serres mentions the enormous amount of work the angels did to
weave the intricately complex network in which our universe unfolds. Its no surprise
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that the focal point of this network is Los Angelesfar from angelic, yet a city of
angels, its center a void, a city ideally peripheral, fleeting, centrifugal.

Thirdspace is however more than an expos of a personal theory. The book offers
an authentic panorama of American criticism today. As I mentioned previously,
despiteor becauseof his daring approach, Soja demonstrates considerable
modesty (a postmodern modesty?), knowing perfectly well that he is stepping into an
environment animated and expanded by others in their own ways. Several names
inevitable surfaced that Soja was bound to address, many remain engraved on the
readers memory. I personally was struck by Sojas passages about the borderland
discussions of Gloria Anzaldua (in Borderland/La Frontera, 1987) and Guillermo
Gomez-Pena: the former a Texan poet, essay writer, and feminist ; the latter a
Californian underground artist of Mexican origin, mestiza performer and of the
frontera (tortilla curtain). Soja admits that a student first brought Gomez-Pena to his
attention. For the sake of anecdote, the circle was open in Los Angeles but closed
down very briefly in Limoges, one of my doctoral students having opted the previous
year to begin a long-term study on Hispano-American thirdspace as evoked by
Anzaldua and Gomez-Pena (and a few others). Soja is spreading out. There are
other names toofeminist geographers that Soja mentions with loving constance
(Gillian Rose, etc.) and that of a major African-American anti-establishment feminist
and social activist: bell hooks, author of Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural
Studies (1990), who refuses to spell her name with capital letters to underscore her
position as spokeswoman for a minority that still has a long way to go, that lives in
the other spaces and is busy deconstructing the binarities that marginalize it,
relegating it to the outskirtsthere, where energy is still nevertheless the purest.

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Referring to Thirdspace and Sojas position, Rob Atkinson has noted that :
Such an approach involves never accepting the finality of knowledge, always seeing
a 'conclusion' as preliminarya staging post on the way to somewhere else.
I wholeheartedly ascribe to this lovely description of Soja, whose
decompartmentalizing methodology is totally appropriate to the comment. But I
believeor at least hopethat it also applies to geocriticism, which I attempted to
promote in an essay published by Minuit last year. Soja was one of those who was
able to inspire the enthusiasm necessary for me to do this. No harm in that.