Abstract
In this chapter I will again deal with space and language, with places and discourses, but more specifically as interrelated in the text. Language and discourse are presented as a sort of architecture; various levels and maps are created that set up among them a complex system of relations with diverse overlappings and conjunctions. In this discourse I will also deal with spaces, in particular the hierarchical relations between different levels and maps, whose "weave" constitutes human dwellings: cities and homes. What sorts of secondary relations — secondary because we are talking about relations of relations — exist in Utopia between the space of the text and space in the text? Remember that the space of the text is constitutive in many ways of the utopic figure in discourse. The discourse refers to the space in the text and speaks of it in the figure utopic fiction creates. I will attempt to deal with these problems, which emerge in a few of the passages I have chosen. This questioning has a contemporary ring, also. If architecture is the art of constructing buildings and/or organizing space in order to create a space where humans can live, what is its relationship to the text? If this act involves manipulating and arranging space into a system of spaces through an architectonics of "living space," what can be said of the connection between architecture and writing and drawing, discourse and blueprint, with signs arranged on a visible surface and constantly grouped and regrouped, torn apart and rearticulated into new groups? It is not absolutely sure that a dwelling or a city is a discourse translating a blueprint into language, or a written surface transposing words and ideas (i.e., desires) into sketched figures.