A certain kind of people minds about their personal space, often in terms of persssonal ssspace. Does the insistence on the ‘s’ matter much? Ontologically speaking no, but psychologically, socially, very much. Because it denotes class? background? geographical origin?  Not quite either, though we’re getting warmer.

This persssonal ssspace is an invented space whose limits are not quantifiable, which doubles up on the one and only space that rigorous solid geometry allows you to properly call your own personal space, namely the space your body is in everywhere you go and everywhere you are. But a post-war phenomenon, twin brother of consumerist individualism, and re-appreciation and re-appropriation of one’s own body as the expression of that individualism, has blossomed into the implicit creation of an spatial outer-shell, known as one’s personal space. Note that it always comes with the possessive pronoun, and ‘the personal space’ is not only an incomplete description but verging on the nonsensical. An expression whose inclusion of the subjective genitive, as a Latin linguist wouldn’t fail to emphasise, is part and parcel of the successful articulation of the formula. There is, in other words, no possibility for objectivity regarding one’s personal space, which is thus wholly determined by one’s own measure. It is a personal construct, which the person imposes and expects and requests to be respected by society and in situ, by the people around them. Which kind of people can and do think up such a thing?

The old Protagorean adage that man is the measure of all things is blasted to smithereens, which just shows what universalist, democratic undercurrents flow through the usually dubious theories of relativism.  Now, man is the measure of his personal space, which no one else is, by nature, capable or allowed to measure against the man himself, and yet everyone is expected to respect this self-imagined, self-constructed spatial limits.

There is a history of practices and mores of an implicit concept akin to personal space. That space which a suitor attempts to transgress by lunging in for a kiss, or a holding of the hand. That space which one has no inclination of infringing with people one has a slight aversion to, (bad breath, general bad-smell vibe, ugliness..), in general these are features directly related to sense-perception. But it is clear that in these cases, ther personal space is defined in a rather strict sense, the geometrical sense evoked above, that of the limits of one’s own body, determined by its shape and plane of motion (smell is interesting here, as it participates as well in defining the limits of one’s body through the distance the smell  (good or bad) the body produces can reach.) So this is not the persssonal ssspace of the late 20th, early 21st century which is in some respects in exact denial of the body and its motions, including the activity of its senses, since it transcends the body to shield a space whose coordinates obey metaphysical and psychological parameters.

Historically, whichever civilisation at whichever time, there has been a constant respect and conceptualisation of a personal space: it has been the space surrounding the prince in all his, or her, categorial incarnations. The prince, as Ernst Kantorowiscz has two bodies, his own and his dominion, from which it follows that the space in which is his second body, is both abstract and distinct from his own. Hence, a series of regulated, coded, choreographed approaches which are meant to respect a consecrated abstract space around that second body.

It is that abstracted space which has now been ingested into the persssonal ssspace, only without the majesty and the political theory which supported the protocol of hierarchical systems. It is, you might think, a democratised second body, outer-shield the Everyman is now allowed and justified in requesting for his or her own little body. But without the majesty around the body of the king, all that is left the hypocrisy and fear  which ultimately supports the hierarchical system of the prince and his dominion. No surprise that people who appeal to it, are usually sociopaths from the mildest to the most criminal sorts.

To seek affirmation of one’s place in society through imposing to others a self-imagined persssonal ssspace is the last resort of an unmasked less than confident individual, potentially dangerous and most certainly untrustworthy.