1 Introduction `` Or, l'essence d'une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun et aussi que tous aient oublie¨ bien des choses. ... Tous citoyens franc° ais doit avoir oublie¨ la Saint-Barthe¨ lemy, les massacres du Midi au XIIIe sie© cle.'' Ernest Renan (1947 ^ 61 [1882]) Benedict Anderson (1991, pages 199^201), in quoting Renan's aphorism, notes the syntax of doit avoir oublie¨ öobliged already to have forgotten öwith its implication of civic duty. He adds that ``Having to `have already forgotten' tragedies [disgraces, humiliations] of which one needs unceasingly to be `reminded' turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction of national genealogies'' (page 201) öa selectively remembered and selectively forgotten antiquity may be a necessary condition for the possibility of `novelty' (page xiv). So, indeed, has been the case in the produc- tion of the Thai ^ Siam nation and, I shall argue, in the production of the space of its national capital. Bangkok space presents as a muddled, mixed-up, chaotic space (figure 1). There seems no order in the locations of things öbungalows, high-rises, shophouse rows, traditional village remnants, malls, and department stores can simply happen any- where, all thrown in together. There seems no such thing as land-use planning önor land uses for that matter, as the same piece of land will exhibit a diversity of uses. It is unlike the space of other (albeit onetime colonised) metropolises of Southeast Asia (Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hanoi, Saigon, Jakarta): there the activities may be utterly disordered, but the spaces always seem to manifest a logic recognisable to the Western mind. But in Bangkok the disorder is in represented space as much as in the spatial practices, to invoke Henri Lefebvre's (1991) distinction. While the disorienting chaos, bewildering muddle, visual and morphological com- plexity, and (to the Western eye?) incomprehensibility of Bangkok nonelite, `everyday' space have attracted an extensive literature öwith elements of it variously alluded to in Bangkok space, and conditions of possibility Ross King Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia; e-mail: rossjk@unimelb.edu.au Received 3 February 2006; in revised form 31 October 2006; published online 5 March 2008 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space advance online publication Abstract. This is an essay on the `conditions of possibility' (Kant) for thinking about the seemingly bizarre spaces of a grandly chaotic city. It is concerned with the possibility of distinctively different, contradictory (therefore incompatible) yet coexisting general modes of thinking öepistemes or dis- cursive formations (Foucault) öand with the possible processes of their production. I begin with those spaces themselves and with their contested social production (Lefebvre), what they appear to show and what they seem to mask. Then, in the second part of the paper, the task is to explore the conditions that might underlie the remembering of many things and the forgetting of many things (Anderson), in the myriad decisions and actions that account for the production of such spaces. The third part is concerned with what these spaces might themselves tell us about deeper origins, the society itself, and its possible trajectory. A brief final part addresses the most problematic of issues: how is self-aware, self-critical discourse to arise in (against?) an episteme that eschews the articulation of criticism? doi:10.1068/dking