Space-using and symbolical sovereignty

Abstract

In this paper the author examines whether there is a search for spatial identity in Hungary – similarly to theoretical notions of symbolisation tendencies – some virtual manifestation in a wide range of political actions, communicative relations of power distance in the way the multiplicity of spatial sub-cultures presents itself in politics. Following a theoretical introduction, the anthropologist author describes the significant communal interactions, the tradition consciousness and the processes of organising public life within a traditional political communication pattern. During the significant periods of Hungarian history, usually dictatorial ideas, disguised as democratic, progressive and symbolical power periods, some space and the representatives of power in the territorial order, the omnipotence of state and new “national” party-state in the external pressure of “progress” tailored by contemporary politicians have emerged.

The spatial scope of politics rarely becomes tangible, thus, its denomination also necessitates symbolic tools, a repertoire of analogous examples, and metaphoric interpretive space. Some of its elements (e.g.: representations concerning the boundary formation of freedom, violence, the limits of political environment or the legal code system) display a varied picture in particular historical periods, and form an even more complicated constellation of meanings if we examine the historical extent of space as a complex effect. With the aim of investigating the relation of space and society (in a deliberately reductive sense) and the symbolic dialogue of power and politics, I, in my essay, scrutinise the interpretive space, which appears as an exciting novelty to us: the symbolic (self)manifestation of space, and the effective validation of spatial presence, or at least the “outlining” of spatial boundaries.

The social sciences – which are forced to categorise to understand/be understood, but because of a compulsion for empirical self-validation, instead of the honorable or stigmatising classic categories of common sense, must keep the balance of the mechanisms of social effects and their respective scientific criticism (Bourdieu) – must comprehend and label the symbolic political field also. This is why Bourdieu (among others) believes that we should consider phenomena of social praxis, such as language, dialect, badges, stigmas, mental formulas, social representations, etc. both as mental and material representations. At the same time, we cannot separate social reality and its display from the struggle for the exclusive possession of power, which is aimed at the acceptance of the legitimate definition of the social world’s division and its group-forming or group-terminating consequences. Thus, the stakes of the struggle is power, which can forcefully implement some kind of vision of the social world through division with the consensual definition of identity and unity, natural continuity and schism, origin-identity, and spatial identity. According to contemporary researchers, respective authority – which strives to create a division appropriate to its interests with revelations, authoritative rhetoric, and limits in the spatial domain – arbitrarily enforces certain territorial units, which, from the viewpoint of localities, do not coincide with borders of either origin, or cultural, economic, and political power relations (Bourdieu 1985, 7–22.). Bourdieu also emphasizes that the novel, symbolic division of the social world is a kind of performative utterance, which aims to establish what it speaks, and forces on those involved common principles of approach and division, which act through perceptual and receptive categories, that is, require a unified approach about identity and an identical approach to unity. This symbolic division of social space and the re-structuration of the social unit always has an institutionalised system of tools, the most exciting of which are acts performed in the struggle for recognition, appearing in the symbolic sphere. That which can be summarised here (considering the space available) is merely the survey of a fundamental question: how do politics and space relate? In my essay I focus on social “transport” or regulation, as well as a basic phenomenon of selective social perception, which I consider to be a basic constituent of social reality. It is not my aim to profusely discuss research trends or systemspecific phenomena, I merely make a disputable attempt to indicate what kinds of spatial concepts intrude on political public opinion and in what symbolic field these become part of public discourse. In my view, in a milieu of increasingly prolific philosophical and sociological issues under scrutiny, there is a dire need for an approach that gives emphasis to another dimension of social division, that of symbolic politics.