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Chapter Thirteen - Mediterranean Edges: Reterritorializing Natural and Social Ecologies
- from Part IV - PORTALS: DIALOGUE, EXCEPTION AND RETERRITORIALIZATION
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- By Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvard University
- Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
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- The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
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- Anthem Press
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- 10 January 2018
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- 02 May 2017, pp 231-242
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Summary
Introduction
Be they natural or artificial, borders are what link and divide. They impede circulation but enable passage and exchange of humans, of goods and of ideas. From time immemorial, especially when drawn across arable land or narrow straits, they have been ribbonlike swaths of intense conflict. While borders striate the surface of our globe, conflict dictates that some are more visible than others, particularly those that separate North and South, between the United States and Mexico or Latin America on one side of our hemisphere and those separating Europe from Africa. In this chapter, I will focus on the Mediterranean, broadly defined, the sea whose width — on his maps drawn around 145 CE — Ptolemy extended far beyond the limits the modern world has known. At any and every point it has been a site of crossing and a barrier for a myriad of cultures and populations. For economic and increasingly ecological reasons the sea has accrued importance as a source of water and food production. At the same time, Fernand Braudel reminds us, while it is more important than ever for sustaining the large populations huddled around it, the Mediterranean is a site of global exchange of goods and people. Under the impact of postcolonial as well as global migration and policies owing to fears of fundamentalism and terrorism, it has become, once again, a seemingly impermeable border.
A tightening of borders is taking place at the very moment when their loosening is urgently needed for the causes of both social and natural ecologies. Thus, when seen not as a sea but as a border, the Mediterranean must be considered in equally theoretical and practical terms. In the context of a reshaping of social processes that defines national identities, the Mediterranean assures constant passage of ships and their cargoes in every cardinal direction. More delicately, where migration is at stake, the Mediterranean becomes the site of the transference of peoples of vastly different origin, language, and social process. When populations move across its waters to land and to live in different milieus, we witness how adaptation to new and different environments on the part of peoples’ different origins compels us to think of ecology in both physical and human terms.
6 - Deleuze and Guattari: Space and Becoming
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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- 13 April 2012, pp 95-111
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Summary
If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume.
Deleuze, NegotiationsPaul Virilio shows how the explosion of the information bomb has direct repercussions on humans and their experience of the nation-state, of the city and of world-space. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw repeatedly on Virilio when they declare that every critical relation, no matter what discipline it uses or represents, has to be treated in view of the world he describes. As Virilio put it, when addressing what he calls Deleuze and Guattari's “poetic or nomadological understanding of the world,”
[t]oday's world no longer has any kind of stability; it is shifting, like the polar ice-cap, or “continental drift”. Nomadology is thus an idea which is in total accordance with what I feel with regard to speed and deterritorialization. So, it is hardly surprising that we clearly agree on the theme of deterritorialization. (Virilio 2005a: 40)
Spatial consciousness is ubiquitous in Deleuze and Guattari's writings. It informs their theory of an event, which Virilio employs in a catastrophic sense, insofar as a sensation of space often becomes the event as it “takes place” and is as quickly abolished. It also subtends their politics, which in their lexicon means creating openings that will enable becomings. Becomings engage what so far has been called existential territorialization.
Extensive and Intensive Space
Written in the aftermath of the events of May 1968, Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, was a spirited attack on capitalism, the state and tributary institutions that included the family, school, religion and, especially, psychiatry. It argued that the contemporary world finds its subjects imprisoned in spaces that are at once stratified and striated, everywhere riddled and cut through by locative coordinates that plot the ways that the world can be thought of. Under the cloak of normalcy in the sphere of capitalism humans are molded into obedient subjects whose docility upholds the social order into which they are born. The “state” and its economic machinery employ what the authors call order-words (“mots d'ordre”) to define the character of communication and commerce, which administrate obedience and docility. Order-words tell their receivers what they must do, how they must behave and where and how they must consume.
Spatial Ecologies
- Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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Spatial Ecologies takes a new look at the “spatial turn” in French cultural and critical theory since 1968. Verena Andermatt Conley examines how Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Augé, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour and Etienne Balibar reconsider the experience of space in the midst of considerable political and economic turmoil. The book considers why French critical theorists turned away from questions of time and looked instead toward questions of space. It asks what writing about space can tell us about life in late capitalism. Conley links this question to the problematic of habitality, taking us back to Heidegger and showing how it informs much of French theory. Building on the author's acclaimed earlier study Ecopolitics, Spatial Ecologies argues, through the voices of the authors taken up the eight chapters, for recognition of the virtue of spatial theory and its pragmatic applications in the global milieu. It will be required reading for scholars of literary and cultural theory, and twentieth- and twenty-first century French culture.
Conclusion: Future Spaces
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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- 13 April 2012, pp 145-154
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Summary
Nothing looks the same. Space is different and so is time. Space is now that of a fully urbanized planet Earth.
Bruno LatourIt is strange to read Bruno Latour, an aficionado of the great wines that his family cultivates in the rolling hills of southern Burgundy, noting that the world is now entirely urbanized. A constructively paranoid response to his assertion, similar to statements by Edward Soja, an urbanist who argues for planetary urbanization, is that little is left for ecology. Latour appeals to hyperbole to argue that the planet will be entirely urbanized. The virtue of this overstatement is found in the fact that the distinction between the country and the city no longer holds, and as a result its argument can be a prompt for a continued variegation of space, which might constitute the basis for an informed sense of ecology that results from close study of the spatial crises that come with globalization. Latour notes that our world is understood less through the information we can gather about it than through the ongoing transformations we witness happening to it. Our perception of the distribution of sites, states and world-space exists only through recognition of rapid and ever-changing alignments, distributions, modes of formatting, and of linking and narrating.
The chapters above have sought to gain a sense of the alignments and their shifts. The method has entailed assembling, reassembling, comparing and contrasting nine French theorists–a mix of philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and public intellectuals–whose reflections on space bear on ecology in the sense of habitability. All of them lead us to a threshold where our own spatial condition can be reconsidered. What dynamisms can we take from their theories to assist us today in thinking what future spaces are possible? And what, we are tempted to ask, is the future of space in general? In the post-war period and especially after 1968, the theorists examined here felt that the world into which they were born was far from the one they had come to know and that, they felt, they would later experience in the course of their lives.
1 - Henri Lefebvre: Lived Spaces
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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- 13 April 2012, pp 11-28
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Summary
Space is only a medium, environment and means, an instrument and intermediary […] [It] never possesses existence in itself but always refers to something else, to existential and simultaneously essential time, subjective and objective […]
Lefebvre, The Urban RevolutionThe user's space is lived not represented (or conceived).
Lefebvre, The Production of SpaceImmense credit is due to Henri Lefebvre for having inaugurated new itineraries of inquiry in critical and cultural theory in the aftermath of the Second World War. Enduring achievements are found in all of his myriad writings, but nowhere more than in his watershed Production of Space (1974), a monumental study in which he asserts that after the turmoil of 1968 a renewed awareness of space complicates inherited ways of calculating time. Space is no longer a neutral background against which humans move about, but is what humans produce as, in turn, it shapes or even produces them. It is both a medium in which things are fashioned and a milieu in which they find their place. Lefebvre correlatively offers a theory and a history of contemporary space coordinated according to the effects of uneven economic development, the advent of the modern State (generally in upper case), and the impact of the accelerated circulation of capital in the bourgeois sphere during the “Trente Glorieuses” or three decades of prosperity that France witnessed after 1945.
He argues that those in power, together with those in collusion with governmental agencies, impose spatial constraints that regiment the lived experience of entire populations. Acutely aware of the Cold War as a time of intense transformation, early on Lefebvre foresees an impending globalization that under the impact of consumer capitalism will displace industrial society from its basis in the manufacture of objects to the commerce of information. He calls into question the heroic Marxist efforts aimed at unifying the world that finished in the gulag, and the longer-lasting effect of the totalitarian state. More traditional (and, as his use of “tradition” implies, “slower” and more deliberate) ways of using space are jettisoned where signs take the place of things. Because they define their lives through the ways they handle and exchange their “things” while living within a regime of signs, humans become increasingly alienated from their bodies and their ties to the world.
5 - Paul Virilio: Speed Space
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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- 13 April 2012, pp 78-94
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Summary
After having lost the street in the nineteenth century, people are now also losing their voice.
Paul VirilioSpeed is not simply a matter of time. Speed is also space-time. It is an environment that is defined in equal measure by space and by time.
Armitage (ed.), Virilio LiveIn his recent homage to Marc Augé, Paul Virilio asserts that the author of Non-Places has turned anthropology into a science responsible less for reconstituting traditional cultures than for scaffolding an art of premonition. The ethnologist of today can no longer study societies “without history” but, rather, the fragile state of a world in which chronological time has telescoped to the state of instantaneity. Space, like the wild ass's skin in Balzac's La Peau de chagrin, has shrunk beyond belief. Virilio, whose brilliantly delphic writings hover between the messianic and the titanic, finds in Augé a friend who senses the effects that the acceleration of information have on subjectivity. The supermodernity (surmodernité) of which Augé writes “is surely the combined effect of the acceleration of history and of a shrinkage of geographical space giving occasion […] to both ‘an individualization of destinies’ and to diverse destinations of action” (Virilio 2008: 100). The effect, he notes, is that individuals now owe their existential being to a condition of solitude. They find themselves in a state of accelerated delocalization, which is exactly what the anthropologist discovered in his own premonitions. Virilio finds in the anthropologist's labors an attempt to gain a distance from himself while within his field of inquiry a tension reigns between premonition (pressentiment) and resentment (ressentiment). Virilio's intergalactic fantasies are born of the tension. He writes that everything is happening today as if we were seeing the world as had the astronauts who landed on the moon forty years ago:
Before this viewpoint of “extrapolarization” the anthropologist of premonition risks quickly being transformed into one of profound resentment in view of the black utopia of disaster that constrains humanity to evacuate the places (les lieux) in order to take exile God-knows-where, far from here and-now, in the outer world of cybernetic illuminism; in a solar cult no longer of light as once before, but of speed; in a new absolute of a century that would be far from that of the “Enlightenment” as everyone already foresees it (le pressent).
Bibliography
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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- 13 April 2012, pp 155-165
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8 - Etienne Balibar: Fictional Spaces
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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- 13 April 2012, pp 127-144
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Summary
Intellectuals translate in order to help create a new space, then they efface themselves.
Balibar, Droit de citéEtienne Balibar's name does not immediately come to mind as a spatial or ecological thinker. A student of Louis Althusser, Balibar was first known for his structural re-reading of Marx, especially for his contributions to Reading “Capital” (1965) in which he studied modes of production, reproduction and the reconstruction of social relations. The mode of analysis he employs in his work of the 1960s and 70s already “spatializes” the world through emphasis on social structures and practices. Since co-authoring with Immanuel Wallerstein a volume entitled Race, Nation, Class (1988), he has devoted much of his writing to problems of democracy in relation to globalization. He identifies two flows, a flow of transnational capital that sets a “trend” (of the kind Baudrillard and Virilio identify) and a massive flow of population. Both are the consequence of decolonization and now, especially, of globalization. Movements of population show him that we need to rethink what we mean by “space” on national, European and worldwide plateaus. He analyzes the relation that moves across subjects and citizens, and militates for an active rethinking of culture and politics at a time when decolonization, economic globalization and forced migration require affirmation of the grounding principles of Marx's political economy.
Balibar raises questions about borders, the construction of territories, the nation-state and the construction of global world-space. More than describing complete spaces, he focuses, in the wake of Marx, on the articulation of action on and across their plateaus. Balibar urges us, however much we mediate our relations with the world through technology, to think and act, at once individually and collectively, as subjects with agency and as active citizens. The subject has to be complemented by a citizen who is not merely the victim of marketing strategies, as we have seen in Baudrillard's economy of the sign. Less pessimistic than Virilio, Balibar does not exclude the possibility of such a citizen. For him, the concept of citizenship is tied to the rights of citizens on one level and, no less intimately, to those of “foreigners” on the other. All move and dwell in three geopolitical spaces of increasing scale: the French nation-state, the European Union and a world-space.
Introduction Space as a Critical Concept
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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- 13 April 2012, pp 1-10
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Summary
This book moves along the wide arc of the “spatial turn” that critical thinking has taken over the last thirty years. It follows this trajectory in order to see how and where space, something that defies reduction to a simple or stable definition, can now be appreciated for its ecological implications. The principal argument that follows is that, to varying degrees, philosophers born of or nurtured by the ferment of “May 1968” build their work over a spatial crisis that has since broadened to include consideration of the well-being of the planet. When critics and writers take a spatial turn they move from traditionally restricted fields of study, their disciplines as it were, to see where their work stands in view of globalization. The spatial turn now curves toward an ethics of living and working collectively on a planet whose habitability seems to be problematic and whose resources are today less abundant than they had been three decades ago.
Before all else it must be asked: might a prodigiously accumulating critical mass of writing on space be a symptom of a diminishing return? Would the increasing number of reflections on the nature of space betray a sense of its attrition? The questions are posed to underscore the paradox motivating much of what follows. While the space our globe allots to us can seem oddly infinite in its finite measure, our worst fears tell us that it is vanishing. But how do we perceive–how do we experience–space so that we may know what it is and appreciate it for what it may be? Before responding to this second question we realize that its formulation tells us that we must have a physical sense of space prior to seeking a definition of its essence. Contrary to the order of classical philosophy, our apprehension of space, the basis for its epistemology, precedes its ontology. The very being of space can only be discerned by how we sense it and by what we feel we know of it. What we ascertain about it is gauged by the way we feel it dilating, contracting, folding upon itself and extending in our midst. We generally tend to define space in the spirit of analogy or relation, especially in the connection between space and place.
Contents
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- 13 April 2012, pp vii-viii
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Dedication
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- 13 April 2012, pp v-vi
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Index
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- 13 April 2012, pp 166-176
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4 - Marc Augé: Non-Places
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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- 13 April 2012, pp 62-77
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Summary
[I]ntelligence of space is less subverted by current upheavals (for soils and territories still exist, not just in the reality of facts on the ground, but even more in that of individual and collective awareness and imagination) than complicated by the spatial overabundance of the present.
Augé, Non-Places[W]e live in a world we have not yet learned to look at. We have to relearn to think about space.
Augé, Non-PlacesThe cover of the American edition of The System of Objects is illustrated with the chromium-plated grille of an American car of the 1960s, a behemoth vehicle that French filmmakers of the New Wave enjoyed inserting into the cityscapes of their films of the same decade. Taken from a neo-Pop painting, the cover signals to today's reader an affinity between the objects that called their culture into question and, in what followed, the hyperreal painters whose works displaying everyday objects in glaring clarity now seem, in view of what we see in “high def” and “blu-ray” television, to be diffusely mottled pastels. The surface effects of digital clarity that Baudrillard studied through a political lens seem remarkably close to what we witness on the televisual screens everywhere in our midst. What they display seems far from the mess and smudge of everyday life, unless, of course, we see them as the refuge of an artificial optical paradise. Such would seem to be the gap between an anthropologist's view of contemporary surface effects and what Baudrillard made of them in his spatial fictions. It is worth peering into the gap by way of what Marc Augé sees in the landmarks of France, especially of Paris, the city that for him is both an object of love and of close and protracted study.
The Anthropologist-Painter of Postmodern Life
An anthropologist in the tradition of Lévi-Strauss who reflects on anthropological spaces and subjectivity in traditional societies, Augé is marked by early preoccupations with the “space of others” that led him to do fieldwork on the Alladian peninsula of the Ivory Coast. After remarking how the palm oil industry contributed to the alteration of indigenous cultures, he returned to France to study new forms of relation and the new anthropological spaces in the urban environment of his childhood, adolescence and, now, later life.
Frontmatter
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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3 - Jean Baudrillard: Media Spaces
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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- 13 April 2012, pp 47-61
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Summary
Mastery of space now leads to control in space.
Baudrillard, The System of ObjectsHumans are distributed spatially, that is, by economics.
Baudrillard, The System of ObjectsAmerica has to be thought in terms of space and not of an existential territory.
Baudrillard, “L'Amérique et la pensée de l'espace”“Cover the Earth”: like the red liquid that drips over our globe in Sherwin-Williams’ emblem advertising its brand of house paint, it can be said that a globalizing consumer culture covers the northern hemisphere and extends on to the sea and land below the Equator. The famous logo is a fitting allegory for the state of the world that theorists in the line of Lefebvre and Certeau in the post-war years, anticipating globalization, had called the effect of the bourgeois and the impact of the disciplinary society. In Chapter 2 I suggested that familial and ethnic networks lose their character when transnational economies redefine them. At a microlevel, argued Certeau, stories and myths that had been vital to everyday life and ecological spaces are now compressed into slogans and advertisements for the ends of economic development. We have seen more directly that his writings deal with ruses and resistances to what he and Lefebvre perceived to be the controls that the state imposes on its citizens through technology and consumerist ideology. Using psychoanalysis, in which the language of the unconscious plays a determining role in human activities, Certeau focuses on questions of existence in relation to place. Writing at the threshold of globalization, he is less interested in a sociology of space than in discerning how everyday practices implicitly subvert urban administration and how migrations are now transforming the shape and complexion of the nation-state.
Along this line of inquiry, Certeau's writings on space and place bear useful comparison with those of Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard is fascinated by the same fascination that drives consumer-based media. Bearing a Marxian signature from his early writings up to his death in 2006, he argues that new forms of capital, increasingly equated with transnational circulation of money and signs, eradicate popular resistance.
7 - Bruno Latour: Common Spaces
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- 25 July 2017
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- 13 April 2012, pp 112-126
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Summary
We must not save vanishing existential spaces but ask how we can exist in a networked world.
Latour, Paris: ville invisible (my translation)Coexistence begins in space more than in time.
Latour, Paris: ville invisibleA common space emerges only through discussion and negotiations.
Latour, War of the WorldsThere is probably no more decisive difference among thinkers than the position they are inclined to take on space: Is space that within which objects and subjects reside? Or is space one of the many connections made by objects and subjects?
Latour, “Spheres and Networks”The writers studied up to now have all been suspicious of the idea that technology will bring salvation to our current spatial crises. They concur, too, when they champion an existential relation with place and space in order to mitigate the damages of unfettered capitalism and modernism. Bruno Latour follows their path. Trained both as a philosopher and an anthropologist, he emphatically declares that all over the world technological developments have altered our grasp of space and time as well as that of the nature and quality of subjectivity. They have repercussions on city- and world-spaces. However, Latour criticizes those who declare that machines dominate us from the top down. He rejects the fiction of a society living in the yoke of a highly circumscribed power elite. He asks how it is possible to live in a world whose demographic density has increased enormously and where space is lacking. How, under these conditions, can humans make the world habitable? It is imperative, he writes, to bring to the fore some of the ways humans can collaborate and create a common space in a rapidly transforming urban mosaic.
A type of machine is operative as a metaphor for every age: the windmill and catapult were the crowning mechanical perfection of the Middle Ages; the cannon, harquebus and ocean-going vessel in the Renaissance; the pullies operating dams, dykes, and sluices of canals in the classical age; the guillotine and chronometer in the Enlightenment; the steam engine in the nineteenth century. Our age is represented by computers, especially the figure of networks through which humans have chosen to represent themselves. With this metaphor, divisions between inside and outside are collapsed; the center is replaced by a large number of temporary knots and fragile threads along which humans and things ceaselessly circulate.
2 - Michel de Certeau: Anthropological Spaces
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- 13 April 2012, pp 29-46
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Summary
Space is a practiced place.
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday LifeSpace is existential, existence is spatial.
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday LifeAt the heart of Lefebvre's writings on cities it is the urban planner who serves the state to shape a collective habitus. Dwellers in metropolitan centers, he notes time and again, have the task of using their milieus creatively, often at odds with the designs imposed upon them. The words are astonishingly similar to those of Michel de Certeau in his writings on everyday life. Lefebvre emerges from Marxist philosophy and history while Certeau counts, as François Dosse has shown (2002), as an inclassable, a writer who approaches space even more eclectically and from a variety of angles that include the history of religion, anthropology, linguistics, city planning, psychoanalysis and sociology. Certeau writes a cultural anthropology that discerns the unconscious religious tenor of everyday life. His discipline is one which mixes late medieval theology with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's aesthetic and existential philosophy, from which he borrows the distinction between anthropological or symbolic and geometric or administrative spaces. When all is said and done both Lefebvre and Certeau deal with ways of living and of being in the world that, when juxtaposed, yield remarkable similarities and differences.
Everyday Practice in a Bureaucratic State
Geometric sites, Certeau argues, are those that a state and a disciplinary regime impose upon their subjects. They exploit architecture, urban planning and available technologies to project their mental and physical design on to members of the polis. The state, he reasons, locates and confines its subjects by means of technological controls that bear resemblance to what Michel Foucault had defined as the apparatus of the disciplinary society or that which imposes a preconceived order upon the citizen.
Spatial Ecologies
- Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory
- Verena Andermatt Conley
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 05 August 2012
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- 29 February 2012
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Spatial Ecologies takes a new look at the spatial turn in French cultural and critical theory since 1968. Verena Andermatt Conley examines how Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Augé, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour and Etienne Balibar reconsider the experience of space in the midst of considerable political and economic turmoil. The book considers why French critical theorists turned away from questions of time and looked instead toward questions of space. It asks what writing about space can tell us about life in late capitalism. Conley links this question to the problematic of habitality, taking us back to Heidegger and showing how it informs much of French theory. Building on the author's acclaimed earlier study Ecopolitics, Spatial Ecologies argues, through the voices of the authors taken up the eight chapters, for recognition of the virtue of spatial theory and its pragmatic applications in the global milieu. It will be required reading for scholars of literary and cultural theory, and twentieth- and twenty-first century French culture.
Conclusion: Future Spaces
- Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvard University
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- Spatial Ecologies
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- 05 August 2012
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- 29 February 2012, pp 145-154
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Summary
Nothing looks the same. Space is different and so is time. Space is now that of a fully urbanized planet Earth.
Bruno LatourIt is strange to read Bruno Latour, an aficionado of the great wines that his family cultivates in the rolling hills of southern Burgundy, noting that the world is now entirely urbanized. A constructively paranoid response to his assertion, similar to statements by Edward Soja, an urbanist who argues for planetary urbanization, is that little is left for ecology. Latour appeals to hyperbole to argue that the planet will be entirely urbanized. The virtue of this overstatement is found in the fact that the distinction between the country and the city no longer holds, and as a result its argument can be a prompt for a continued variegation of space, which might constitute the basis for an informed sense of ecology that results from close study of the spatial crises that come with globalization. Latour notes that our world is understood less through the information we can gather about it than through the ongoing transformations we witness happening to it. Our perception of the distribution of sites, states and world-space exists only through recognition of rapid and ever-changing alignments, distributions, modes of formatting, and of linking and narrating.
The chapters above have sought to gain a sense of the alignments and their shifts. The method has entailed assembling, reassembling, comparing and contrasting nine French theorists—a mix of philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and public intellectuals—whose reflections on space bear on ecology in the sense of habitability.
1 - Henri Lefebvre: Lived Spaces
- Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvard University
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- Book:
- Spatial Ecologies
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- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 05 August 2012
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- 29 February 2012, pp 11-28
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Summary
Space is only a medium, environment and means, an instrument and intermediary […] [It] never possesses existence in itself but always refers to something else, to existential and simultaneously essential time, subjective and objective […]
Lefebvre, The Urban RevolutionThe user's space is lived not represented (or conceived).
Lefebvre, The Production of SpaceImmense credit is due to Henri Lefebvre for having inaugurated new itineraries of inquiry in critical and cultural theory in the aftermath of the Second World War. Enduring achievements are found in all of his myriad writings, but nowhere more than in his watershed Production of Space (1974), a monumental study in which he asserts that after the turmoil of 1968 a renewed awareness of space complicates inherited ways of calculating time. Space is no longer a neutral background against which humans move about, but is what humans produce as, in turn, it shapes or even produces them. It is both a medium in which things are fashioned and a milieu in which they find their place. Lefebvre correlatively offers a theory and a history of contemporary space coordinated according to the effects of uneven economic development, the advent of the modern State (generally in upper case), and the impact of the accelerated circulation of capital in the bourgeois sphere during the “Trente Glorieuses” or three decades of prosperity that France witnessed after 1945.
He argues that those in power, together with those in collusion with governmental agencies, impose spatial constraints that regiment the lived experience of entire populations.