Resumen de Theorizing the modern spaces of experience
Modernity is a term that has been widely used to highlight temporal transformation in relation to a specific societal selfunderstanding.
It has been predominantly seen as a moment of rupture that happened between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries in parts of Europe and the United States in which expectations of a projected human future became part of historical experience. In modern thought the discussion about space and human experience has been dormant in that it has not received the same theoretical attention as the dimension of time. The spatiality of modernity, which is assumed to be a neutral or fixed entity, became an underlying condition in the mainstream Western understanding of the transformations of modernity until very recently. It is still present in influential sociological theories, such as Anthony Giddens’ work on modernity. The spatial experience of modernity – how human beings from different parts of the world have been making modernity through movement, and how it has constituted the modern structure of knowledge – has not yet been fully scrutinised from a socio-theoretical point of view.
To compensate for this shortcoming, in this paper the spatial experience of modernity will be taken as key problem for social theory. It will be done through following the general premise that the displacement of people and ideas reveals important features of the self-constitution of modernity, especially as regards modern knowledge and the meaning of space in modernity. In making this proposal to highlight the spatial dimension, the aim is not to replace the temporal conception of modernity but rather to complement it.
