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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

Often neuroscientific research on orientation involves contrasts
between orientation in the light and in darkness, such that orientation
may or may not persist across the change. We see something of this
sort when the speaker marries the young man at fourteen, but
“fac[es] the dark wall.” The image is significant for our sense of space
in that she is orienting herself relative to the young man (now her
husband), but she is doing so by avoidance rather than attention. In
turning toward the wall and the darkness, she most obviously mini-
mizes her experience of the orienting properties of the scene. More
significantly, she withdraws from the young man, preventing his ac-
cess. The point of the scene is that she is refusing the intimacy im-
plied by marriage. Her relation to space here is a matter of closing
herself off, segmenting the space, creating a separation that functions
to isolate them from one another almost as much as they are isolated
after he leaves, for in neither case do they converse or touch. In both
cases, the organization of space is largely a matter of direction toward
a target—the boy for the girl and the girl for the boy—and the possi-
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bility of access. In both cases, the nature of that organization is a
function of emotion, whether shy reticence or attachment longing.
Orientation, as we have been considering it, is a matter of what
neuroscientists (and researchers in other fields) refer to as ‘egocentric’
space, space organized in relation to one’s own point of view, as op-
posed to ‘allocentric’ or objective space. Put simply, egocentric
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space involves such concerns as (among others) whether something
is or is not within reach. In contrast, allocentric space might concern
the distance of one object from another in feet and inches. Again, my
contention is that egocentric space is, when situated in lived experi-
ence, imbued with emotion, which is then crucial for understanding
the components of that egocentric space.

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The orientated character of action has been noted by Phenomenological
writers. Martin Heidegger developed the point extensively in his treatment
of spatiality and the “ready-to-hand,” as opposed to the space of objects “pre-
sent-at-hand” (see 134-148). It has also been stressed influentially by Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (see, for example, 23).
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“Objective” here does not mean “without bias.” It means, “space defined
only by the relations among objects,” as in a coordinate system (e.g., longi-
tude and latitude), rather than “space defined relative to a subject,” as in the
distinction between things that I can or cannot get without leaving the sofa.

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