Andrew's Wiki
Places Margin Alternative (changes)

Showing changes from revision #1 to #2: Added | Removed | Changed

Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity
Rob Shields, 1991

Intro

• “Marginal places, towns and regions which have been ‘left behind’ in the modern race for progress, evoke both nostalgia and fascination.” 3
  • out of the way, illicit, old-fashioned, Other
  • Each marginal place corresponds to a “social periphery”
  • “periphery of cultural systems of space in which places are ranked relative to each other”
  • the places become identical to that social stigma, apart from empirical reality
• Brighton: on the coast of England yet accessible: perfect for “carnivals of desire and explosions of unrest” 4
  • beach: how cultures categorize space and place
• Canadian North: a heartland but still an Other
• it takes cultural work to make a place into a social periphery
  • Stallybrass and White’s The Poetics and Politics of Transgression identified the central European binary high/low; where you’ll have a whole spectrum of categories high, higher, highest etc
    • High is fascinated and repelled by the low; you want to reject it but you desire it
    • the Low is in High as “a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life” qtd 5, which makes the “socially peripheral” actually “symbolically central”
      • politically denied, symbolically incorporated
  • So Shields says Central/Marginal is one too, and marginal will be the site of low culture, “the culture of the marginalized” 5 (noting that Said said this too)
    • me: so sometimes leisure is when you get to access the high for awhile, and other times you get to access the low for awhile…
• Center uses Periphery in two diff ways: official discourse despises it, but its emotional and imaginative discourse incorporate it
• Of course marginality always in a state of change, never “achieved” once and for all
• “near-sacred liminal zones of Otherness” 6
• “carnivalesque leisure spaces of ritual inversion of the dominant, authorised cultures”
• myths an images give them a unique sense of place
• Modernity
  • Places are key images in modernity
  • Sites are “of someone and for something”
  • They might be mythical or just images, but they have real consequences for social practice
    • cf politicians using place rhetoric and then think of regional or urban planners
• Spatial
  • “has an ontic aspect as the forgotten datum of social practices” 8
  • at once socially constructed AND a medium through which society works
  • he says space is more than just the historically and culturally specific: if we look at the tools by which space is constructed and how it is manipulated for specific ends, we can critique the present and suggest future spacial arrangements
    • he doesn’t want to be merely descriptive, is someone against phenomenological paralysis
  • also he’s against looking at race, class, gender in and of themselves and says you have to look at them within larger context

Random

• Two examples of hermeneutic approaches to space: Pocock and Hudson, Images of the Urban Environment and Gould and White’s Mental Maps (in the seventies)
• Durkheim and Mauss, 1963, taking D and G’s territorialization (“its transformation from undifferentiated ‘natural’ space into the coded topography of ‘civilised’ territory” 11-12)
• Space as “reflecting social divisions: Benjamin 1978, Sorokin 1943 (Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time; he noted that industrialization and urbanization were connex w/mathematical concepts of space and time developing), Needham 1973, Giddens 1984
• Towbridge 1912 one of the first to speak of space in terms of images or maps: while some city dwellers seem to orient themselves just fine, others are disoriented as they exist “theatres” and “Subway.” The disoriented people have “imaginary maps” he says only for their homes and neighborhoods and that gets them in trouble. The oriented people have “egocentric maps” where they use themselves as their geographical axis and don’t get lost.
  • After that geographers are interested in mental modelling of space, say Pocock and Hudson; as mediation between behavior and environment
  • The problem was how to generalize individual behavior; David Lowenthal 1967 has article that creates an approach to find both in a “geographical epistemology” with social custom there, but mostly individualized. The next 20 years people followed his lead of “micro-geographies”
    • Images are in continuous flux for an individual, but after a time a person reaches a saturation level and their perceptions crystallize, harden and “taken for granted”
    • At this point, then, people ARE NOT talking about social construction of categories (phenomenologists and hermeneuticists do this)
      • will only be put to death when people see the empiricist aspirations of assuming you can know what this mental image looks like and treat it as a “fact” like any other; critics say the mental map is polyvocal, complex, and NOT causally related (whereas they’d assumed simple, univocal, causal) 13
      • and Lefebvre calls this an overly visual approach, which reinforces an arbitrary subject/object split (Shields notes that Pocock and Hudson had clearly been assuming this split, talking about “perception” and input/output metaphors; and they did say it was mostly visual)
      • it actually led to people using PHOTOS to do research with! (Cosgrove 1982: this isn’t true; people interact w/environments)
  • 60s-80s people were worried about this link between individual and universal, for they realize that people in same groups or classes act diff, and even the same person in a diff mood
• Phenomenology: against the dualism
  • the “lifeworld”
    • Vidal de la Blanche’s “genre de vie:” “a lifeworld rooted in a particular land” qtd 15 with “total and unself-conscious involvement…the person and place are indisociable” with (Shield’s words) “submerged or blurred in a continuous dialectical interchange where a person seeks to identify with and through his or her environment” 15
  • get back the emotional content that had been emptied out by positivists
  • late 70s applied Heidegger “dwelling” and “place” (beginning with Relph) (Heidegger: home is a place where you feel rooted, in the midst of modern rootlessness which has been created by the outlook of domination over the environment)
  • What’s wrong with phenomenology? It’s naive about the ability of language to reflect unproblematically your meaning (for example Yi-Fu Tuan has said that there are authentic, meaningful relations with space in pre-intellectual world, but Shields says Derrida says you can’t have “meaning” without language and is language “authentic” and “pre-intellectual”? nope)
    • they think that language can describe sense experience b/c all you have to do is “lift the veil” of “taken-for-grantedness” 17
    • they forget “the force of normatic socialization”
• Hermeneutics
  • Asks the question of how stereotyped images of places are shared/communicated
  • Usually has humanist interest in “subjective interpretiations” of time and space and experience
  • It’s rooted in Dilthey, 1900, rejecting Husserl b/c Husserl brackets everyday experience. Instead, notes Dilthey, “meaning is contextually located in the world, not found floating around as a transcendental essence outside of experience” 17
    • All experience occurs within a process of interpretation via the mediation of past experiences, which give you suppositions. Just like in a book you read it through your own life or some framework to understand it, experience too is mediated to become meaningful. Meaning is not in the thing itself, but in the process of experience.
  • Thus a hermeneutic approach to space would admit that there’s no objective THING that you are going to study. “Place-images, and our views of them, are produced historically, and are actively contested” 18
    • they are not “a unified corpus of images and symbols that can be definitively interpreted once and for all” (see Clifford and Marcus 1986)
  • the world is laden with meanings, and only b/c you have some prior (in Giddens’ words) “meaning-frame” to make sense of it with. That’s why you can’t bracket (take out, ignore) point of view. While phenomenology wants to find intuitive, pre-conscious meaning, hermeneutics says that doesn’t exist.
  • Heidegger’s “hermeneutic circle:” where two diff objects of study or the object and the supposed “observer” or two diff “lifeworlds” are being confronted, encountered, and it leads to them being mutually defined against each other
  • B/c it’s aware of your own meaning-frame, it asks you to be self-reflexive and historicist (like James Clifford’s take on ethnographical fieldwork: the “Dialogical trend” in ethnography writing)
    • infl by Bakhtin carnival, heteroglossia, dialogism (dialogism: where the text becomes a speaker, “talks back” “sees,” revealing a culture that’s not unified but made of multiple competing voices; where “many voices clamour for attention” 19
    • and therefore you can’t claim to “represent” something; you need to show the “Active dialogue” between “different constructions of reality”
  • Hermeneutics reveals about the object of study and about the person doing the study
    • and it’s even the technique that everyone uses to negotiate the world already, so it’s not imposed or academic
  • Geertz: “what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatiots are up to” (1973) which for Shields is what Giddens’ “double hermeneutic” means
    • Upshot for geographers: you have to “grasp” the systems of meanings that these people have constructed themselves and find new context for meaning for them
• Environmental Semiotics
  • inspired by Barthes’ Mythologies
  • but really was in motion in 1950s b/c of Levi-Strauss who was saying that you could use Saussurean linguistics to interpret cultural objects, rituals, myths to figure out the cultural semiotic system 22
  • Places can start to symbolize other things: the Jamaican honeymoon symbolizes you are married, the private jet that you are rich, etc: Krampen’s “function signs” 1979 that symbolize status, attitudes
  • Problems with it
    • No actual engagement w/the territory but only w/symbols
    • “empiricistic materialism” b/c you only see meaning via the structural function of the object, so you forget history or human experience
  • The Compromise: Rossi-Landi has said over and over again to use the linguistic stuff as a rough homology, not as the ultimate determining factor of meaning. You need to remember history and uses of land too, so treat semiology as one tool but not the only tool
• Critique of Positivist Geography
  • mental images, cognitive maps “perpetuate the administrative bias of the social sciences identified by Foucault” 24 that is they don’t reflect on their own conditions of being
  • or what Rose called “modernist neo-Kantianism” 1985 where you try to mimic natural sciences and don’t think about the social science condition
  • or when you take hte object out of its context, ie Pocock’s examination of Catholic churches outside of anything but the place itself, yields only fragmentation, isn’t brought within larger network of cultural meaning; it forgets to look at the social process of spatialization that creates meaning via associations with ideas, emotions, national or ideological constructs
• Phenomenology doesn’t get social construction of meaning, and doesn’t let you do historical readings of change over time
• He likes semiotic’s ideas of “transfunctionalism” where you can have multiple functions (Brighton is leisure or illicit sex)
• Problems w/hermeneutics
  • It shows the actor’s point of view, erasing cultural grid behind it
  • Sure, you understand the self-conscious movements of the actor’s mind, but what about social meanings? Marxists have taken exception to this.
    • Foucault supports this: “One cannot suppose the actors are lucidly or even dimly aware of what their activity means…that is, how their activity serves to further a complex strategical situation in a given society” (1980b)
  • Also says nothing about collective objects, identities