Brecciation, post-geographies, and spaces in transition

Abstract

This commentary on Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch’s article, ‘Keeping You Post-ed: Space-Time Regimes, Metaphors, and Post-Apartheid’, focuses on two aspects. First, I expand on the metaphor of brecciation and how it can shine a light on processes that are still becoming – extending time and spatial configurations as variegated elements in a whole. Second, I want to build on the author’s reflection of tracking space-time regimes by considering how being ‘in the midst of transition’ interferes with preconceived timelines of what it means to be pre and post, and displays hidden processes as spatial configurations unfold.

Of waters and bridges

“…The post is a rather generational idiom, born from the political and economic turmoil of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as from high hopes. Indeed, my interest in the post is part of my temporal and generational positionality on first encountering South Africa as a Nadia Bartolini (2021) and Danielle Drozdzewski (2021) remind us that there are other, less spectacular posts, such as the postindustrial with its slower temporalities and more diffuse spatialities. Their commentaries reveal that the post should not be tethered to better futures, although powerful narratives-the replacement, however incomplete, of authoritarian regimes by formal democracies-have infused our thinking of the post with (cruel) optimism.…”

“…The commentaries provide sophisticated arguments of how ‘time and space work together to produce new urban places with the past’ (Bartolini, 2021); their focus tilts my answers toward issues of time rather than space-time. However, before I address these more extensively, let me evoke two spatial questions in the space-time regime that my paper suggests we analyze.…”

“…Indeed, my proposition comes from specific places and times, and thus doesn’t do full justice to other scales, to spatial networks rather than sites, and to the dis-locations that are part and parcel of the post situation. Second, I find Nadia Bartolini’s (2021) valuable further elaboration of brecciation a wonderful example and powerful theoretical tool for illustrating what thinking with space-time can do. As a ‘process in flux’ and not simply an ‘output’, brecciation speaks of places without distinguishing space from time—something that, in practice, is quite difficult to achieve, since we (I definitely include myself in this!)…”