Place: A Short Introduction (2004)
By Tim Cresswell
Synopsis: The goal of this book is "to scrutinize the concept of place and its centrality to both geography and everyday life," (1) and does this by showing place as a process more than as a static thing. The book then delves into an overview of the major conceptualizations of place, especially as seen through the lens of geography: 1) Defining Place (three human geography concepts: space, place, and landscape - landscape as a way of looking and being outside, while place is a way of being, and being inside; "place" as a concept wasn't big until the 1970s with the rise of humanistic geography founded on phenomenology); 2) The Geneology of Place (place as both object and process; Carl Sauer and the way mid-century geographers focus on "culture areas" and the way groups impact natural habitats; place as in flux and in motion, and some are bothered by that; three ways place is approached: descriptive, social constructionist [how do underlying power forces influence it], and phenomenological [place as connected to ways of being human; the most humanistic geography approach]); 3) Reading 'A Global Sense of Place' (idea that globalization bothered people's sense that place should be about rootedness and authenticity; Doreen Massey argues instead for new conceptualization of place in which it is open and hybrid and flowing - place as process); 4) Working With Place (what to focus on when doing place - such as memory, place identity, what's considered in/out of place). This book is more a synthesis of others' work as opposed to an argument-driven work, but he seems to be arguing for the primacy of "place as process." Says political geographer John Agnew defines place as a meaningful location via 1) location (fixed objective coordinates), 2) locale ("material setting for social relations"), and 3) sense of place ("subjective emotional attachment people have to place") (7). "Place, at a basic level, is space invested with meaning in the context of power" (12).
Interacts With:
All books obsessed with the importance of place/geography:
American Empire (Neil Smith),
Place as a process/a fluid thing, and not as a static entity. This idea connects to regionalism too:
The Middle West (James Shortridge - our concept/mapping of the midwest changes over time to meet present needs, and we keep shifting our definitional location of the midwest to the most rural parts; this shows that we have some kind of need as Americans to have a "heartland" that is rural and agricultural, even if this is no longer the dominant reality of the midwest).
Even books about presentist uses of the past, such as Shadowed Ground
This idea of the fluctuation and fluidity is central to all of the lists; the one thing that's constant in history in change - and we should embrace this. Change is what allows forces and entities to remain alive, relevant, and meaningful.
Doreen Massey with her idea that place is a process [what exactly does that mean though? Just that the realities and identities of place are always in motion?] David Harvey also sees place as a process.
Apparently this book has a great reference/resource section as the final chapter as well.
**This book is really useful - buy!!** Has lots of good definitions.
Idea that we can't exist without place, we need to construct it in order to be human (33).
Showing posts with label power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label power. Show all posts
Monday, March 24, 2008
American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization
American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003)
By Neil Smith
Synopsis: Smith's book is an attempt to demonstrate how historical change and geographical knowledge are linked by focusing on the "American Century" as beginning in 1898 "where the government, corporate institutions, and ruling class sought a twentieth-century globalism best conceived as an American Empire" (xvii). The goal of the book is to challenge the belief that the "American Century" was/is beyond geography, and does this by following the development of U.S. globalism through the twentieth century. This book is massive and dense and divided into five parts: I: From Exploration to Enterprise: Geography on the Cusp of Empire; II: The Rise of Foreign Policy Liberalism: The Great War and the New World; III: The Empire at Homes: Science and Politics; IV: The American Lebensraum; V. The Bitter End. The basic argument is "power always expresses spatiality" (xix), and we are thus not "beyond geography." Henry Luce had exclaimed in 1941 that geography was dead. The book also argues that there have been three formative moments in America's rise to globalism: 1) 1898 and the colonial wars (kind of up to WWI); 2) WWII; 3) 1989-1999 - "Capitalist revolution" or "globalization." U.S. expansion/imperialism too an increasinly market-based form as opposed to territorial/straight-up colonial form. The book spends a lot of time on Isaiah Bowman - a geographer, university president, and presidential advisor who impacted geographical policy in the U.S. Geopolitics emerges as a modern mix of power via political control of territory. It's now all about international connections of power and the market.
Interacts With:
Foreign policy,
Hmm, there seems to be a common sort of "insecurity" among geographers, that they often feel the need to defend themselves and prove that they are still relevant. This makes sense - especially with the recent decline in geography programs - but sometimes it can come off as a little tedious. I mean, ok, yes, geography and place are important - do we really need to keep arguing that place is important? Let's just justify this by talking about it/working on this instead of constantly pointing this out. Just do it!
This book is tricky and I don't have much to say about it.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Understanding Popular Culture
Understanding Popular Culture (2006 [1986])
By John Fiske
Synopsis: This book is an attempt to outline a theory of popular culture in capitalist societies (ix). Main argument is that popular culture is the culture of the subordinated and the disempowered, "and thus always bears within it the signs of power relations, traces of the forces of domination and subordination that are central to our social system"...(5). Popular culture is fluid and changing and full of contradiction, and change can only come from below. Popular culture is an active process that must be relevant to the immediate social situation of the people. In this way, "consumers" make their own oppositional meaning from within the space that they are given, which results in an ever present struggle for control over meaning. Uses jeans as a semiotically-rich example, as tearing can be an act of resistance. Popular culture is a type of pleasure which is sometimes subjugated by the ruling classes, as pleasure can be seen as a sort of "out of control-ness." There are two types of pleasure: jouissance (the pleasure of avoiding social order), and plaisir (the pleasure of relating to it) [I guess this comes from Barthes?]. Fiske argues that popular culture is not subject to "aesthetics" (in the elitist sense of the word), because popular culture is important for what it does and not for what it is. Popular culture can thus be used to create moments of progressivism which can help people combat the dominant culture.
Interesting Specifics:op
** Great one! Focus on for exam! **
Pop culture is full of contradiction.
In the U.S., news moves from East to West (due to time zones), and weather moves from West to East. East = Culture, West = Nature (10).
"A commodity is ideology made material" (14).
"Popular culture is not consumption; it is culture - the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system: culture, however industrialized, can never be adequately described in terms of the buying and selling of commodities" (23).
A popular culture text must "contain both the forces of domination and the opportunities to speak against them" (25).
"Popular culture is the art of making due with what the system provides" (25). [This is very de Certeau]
In capitalist societies, there is no "authentic fold culture" against which to measure the "inauthentic" mass culture (27).
"Every act of consumption is an at of cultural production, for consumption is always the production of meaning" (35).
"Popular pleasures arise from the social allegiances formed by the subordinated people, they are bottom-up and thus must exist in some relationship of opposition to power (social, moral, textual, aesthetic, and so on) that attempts to discipline and control them" (49).
Loss of self = evasion of ideology [I think this connects to the idea of utopia - that within popular culture there is space to lose ones' self, and this is essentially what utopia thrives on].
"The struggle for control over the meanings and pleasures of the body... is crucial because the body is where the social is most convincingly represented as the individual and where politics can best disguise itself as human nature" (70).
The obsession with the individual body is an obsession with capitalism and labor, and what labor produces (96). [Which would be the opposite of the collective Rabelais-ian body].
"Aesthetics is naked cultural hegemony, and popular discrimination properly rejects it" (130). Aesthetics is also "an attempt by the bourgeoisie to exert the equivalent control over the cultural economy that is does over the financial" (130).
In saying popular culture is not mass culture: "Mass culture is a term used by those who believe that the cultural commodities produced and distributed by the industries can be imposed upon the people in a way that irons out social differences and produces a unified culture for a passive, alienated mass audience" (177).
"...I do wish to question the claims that radical art is politically more effective than the progressive uses of popular art" (191).
"...I believe the popular forces to be a positive influence in our society and that failing to take proper account of their progressive elements is academically and politically disabling" (194).
Interacts With:
Stuart Hall (with his belief in the firm existence of a "popular culture" category that appeals to the "downtrodden")
Anything that talks about the fluidity of popular culture.
Bakhtin (discussion of carnival and the "proper" uses of the body, especially as the body becomes "individualized" via capitalism and body as labor unit, versus the Rabelais world of the holistic/collective body)
de Certeau (as relates to idea that people make due with what they are given by the dominant culture; can then eek out own meaning within those goods/texts/practices]
Barthes
Bourdieu (as relates to idea that working class culture is more participatory, and bourgeois is more about distance)
I think this book was a bit of a break-through, idea that consumers of pop culture are not just mindless dupes, and can in fact create their own meaning and forms of resitence from what they're given.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Orientalism
Orientalism - Intro Only (2003 [1978])
By Edward Said
Synopsis: Said examines the exteriority of Orientalism - that is, its visible representation - in order to get at the origins of the use of Orientalism in the West, particularly as it relates to world political relationships and webs of power. He does this by looking at "style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, [and] not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to come great original" (21). Said argues that the Orient has helped to define Europe (and the West) via its position as a contrasting "image, idea, personality, experience" (2), hence the development of a dichotomy between the Orient and the Occident. This Western use of the Orient has allowed the West to dominate, restructure, and otherwise have authority over the Orient, a phenomena which has aesthetic, political, economic, sociological, historical, and philological dimensions.
Interesting Specifics:
Says "non-political" knowledge (such as literature) should not really be seen in such an apolitical way (10).
Orientalism is shaped by political, intellectual, cultural, and moral power (12).
Said is very interested in British, French, and American uses of the concept.
Interacts With:
In prioritizing only the image/representation, this book seems to be a straight-up myth symbol book.
References Gramsci's notion of hegemony.
By Edward Said
Synopsis: Said examines the exteriority of Orientalism - that is, its visible representation - in order to get at the origins of the use of Orientalism in the West, particularly as it relates to world political relationships and webs of power. He does this by looking at "style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, [and] not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to come great original" (21). Said argues that the Orient has helped to define Europe (and the West) via its position as a contrasting "image, idea, personality, experience" (2), hence the development of a dichotomy between the Orient and the Occident. This Western use of the Orient has allowed the West to dominate, restructure, and otherwise have authority over the Orient, a phenomena which has aesthetic, political, economic, sociological, historical, and philological dimensions.
Interesting Specifics:
Says "non-political" knowledge (such as literature) should not really be seen in such an apolitical way (10).
Orientalism is shaped by political, intellectual, cultural, and moral power (12).
Said is very interested in British, French, and American uses of the concept.
Interacts With:
In prioritizing only the image/representation, this book seems to be a straight-up myth symbol book.
References Gramsci's notion of hegemony.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)
By Laura Mulvey
Synopsis: Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to analyze the role of desire in the act of looking at/consuming film, Mulvey seeks to deconstruct the ease of narrative film and and visual pleasure, to "break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire" (30). Describes scopophilia (the love of looking at objects/people) as one of the biggest pleasures of cinema. In traditional cinema, this "gaze" has usually been focused on a woman, and thus the woman becomes objectified and fetishized while the male onscreen (and supposedly as embodied by the viewer too) becomes the one in control. The female becomes both an object of desire, and a representative of castration (hence, a threat). Because film is a medium which controls so much of the visual experience, "cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39). We must break down these codes if we are to challenge the pleasures it provides. Bottom line: women are fetishized in film, while also embodying castration fears; the male gaze is the gaze of power.
Interesting Specifics:
"It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay" (30).
"Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing) cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39).
Interacts With:
This is seen as one of the most famous film criticism essays ever written. She did introduce the idea of "the gaze," and the gaze as a symptom of power asymmetry.
Again, this annoys. Why does the gaze have to be male? Is this an inherently "male" way of looking, or is it just a "person in power" way of looking? This is problematic, and essentializes gender.
By Laura Mulvey
Synopsis: Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to analyze the role of desire in the act of looking at/consuming film, Mulvey seeks to deconstruct the ease of narrative film and and visual pleasure, to "break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire" (30). Describes scopophilia (the love of looking at objects/people) as one of the biggest pleasures of cinema. In traditional cinema, this "gaze" has usually been focused on a woman, and thus the woman becomes objectified and fetishized while the male onscreen (and supposedly as embodied by the viewer too) becomes the one in control. The female becomes both an object of desire, and a representative of castration (hence, a threat). Because film is a medium which controls so much of the visual experience, "cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39). We must break down these codes if we are to challenge the pleasures it provides. Bottom line: women are fetishized in film, while also embodying castration fears; the male gaze is the gaze of power.
Interesting Specifics:
"It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay" (30).
"Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing) cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39).
Interacts With:
This is seen as one of the most famous film criticism essays ever written. She did introduce the idea of "the gaze," and the gaze as a symptom of power asymmetry.
Again, this annoys. Why does the gaze have to be male? Is this an inherently "male" way of looking, or is it just a "person in power" way of looking? This is problematic, and essentializes gender.
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)
by Judith Butler
Synopsis: Asks, how do certain bodies come to matter at all? Butler examines the fact that "'sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time," and that "performativity "produces the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2). This is a mostly theoretical work which relies heavily of psychoanalytic Lacanian theory to postulate about power and hegemony and the heterosexual regime. Butler is very interested in "the body" and materiality and naming and heterosexist images. Basic argument seems to be that the heterosexual regime tries to impose itself on the materiality of bodies. She is interested in the "lesbian phallus" and all things phallocentric. She argues that the way things are named is imbibed with power and gender issues. "Performing" gender re-enforces some kind of heterosexist regime; performative acts as authoritative speech.
Interesting Specifics:
Performativity "produce[s] the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2).
When things are not clearly gendered, they seem almost "unhuman" (8).
"Matter" linked to "materiality" linked to productive capacity linked to womb linked to female.
"...there is no sexuality outside of power" (95).
Says she seeks in this book "to recast performativity as a specific modality of power as discourse" (187). She seems especially concerned with "the real" and with the construction of power relations.
"To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate" (231).
Interacts With:
Honestly, this book was nearly impossible to understand, and I'm not sure if I even have a basic understanding of it yet. I realize basically that she is obsessed with gender in a fairly paranoid way, and is also obsessed with idea of "performing" gender.
Apparently, she takes a "poststructuralist" approach. According to some review in Gender and Society, Butler sees sex as "not simply a factual/natural category...rather, it is a normative one." Supposedly her theory is meant as an improvement on social constructionism.
by Judith Butler
Synopsis: Asks, how do certain bodies come to matter at all? Butler examines the fact that "'sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time," and that "performativity "produces the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2). This is a mostly theoretical work which relies heavily of psychoanalytic Lacanian theory to postulate about power and hegemony and the heterosexual regime. Butler is very interested in "the body" and materiality and naming and heterosexist images. Basic argument seems to be that the heterosexual regime tries to impose itself on the materiality of bodies. She is interested in the "lesbian phallus" and all things phallocentric. She argues that the way things are named is imbibed with power and gender issues. "Performing" gender re-enforces some kind of heterosexist regime; performative acts as authoritative speech.
Interesting Specifics:
Performativity "produce[s] the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2).
When things are not clearly gendered, they seem almost "unhuman" (8).
"Matter" linked to "materiality" linked to productive capacity linked to womb linked to female.
"...there is no sexuality outside of power" (95).
Says she seeks in this book "to recast performativity as a specific modality of power as discourse" (187). She seems especially concerned with "the real" and with the construction of power relations.
"To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate" (231).
Interacts With:
Honestly, this book was nearly impossible to understand, and I'm not sure if I even have a basic understanding of it yet. I realize basically that she is obsessed with gender in a fairly paranoid way, and is also obsessed with idea of "performing" gender.
Apparently, she takes a "poststructuralist" approach. According to some review in Gender and Society, Butler sees sex as "not simply a factual/natural category...rather, it is a normative one." Supposedly her theory is meant as an improvement on social constructionism.
The Practice of Everyday Life
The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
By Michel de Certeau
Synopsis: Utilizing a pop culture approach, de Certeau examines the ways in which "submissive groups subvert the meaning of those things imposed on them by using those things for their own, different means" (xiii). Argues that we must examine the gap between producers' intent and the actual consumer's use. He utilizes a range of fields including sociology, history, anthropology, and literature, though his theory is grounded in linguistics and focuses on speech acts and rhetoric. Book includes sections on ordinary culture, theory of practice, spatial practice, language, and believing. Is concerned with small creative acts of "weak" people rather than with overt oppositional movements; that is, how do consumers "resist" or make meaning through small acts/gestures. For example, he views walking as a creative act because you can carve your own path; reading too because it's about movement. Seems also to be annoyed by the privileging of speech/the visible/sight [interacts with Lefebvre in this way].
Interesting Specifics:
Most people today are on the margins, that is, they are not producers of culture. [This clearly is a pre-internet statement to make, because it totally leaves out the flexibility of production now, the value of the internet and digital media overall a la Convergence Culture's argument].
"Strategies" are more connected to a place/seat of power, whereas "tactics" are more about time - i.e. doing what you can in that given moment; a strategy is for those is power, a tactic is an act of the weak (37).
Strategies use spatial practices to articulate power.
"Walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language" (97).
"Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it 'speaks'" (99).
"To walk is to lack a place" (103).
Reading has no place; reader as traveler.
The fact that we no longer read out loud, shows that text no longer imposes its voice and rhythm on the body of the reader; text has become disembodied (175-76).
"The simulacrum is what the relationship of the visible to the real becomes when the assumption crumbles that an invisible immensity of Being (or of beings) lies hidden behind appearances" (187). We decide what is real based on its relationship to other things..
"The 'real' is what, in a given place, reference to another place makes people believe in" (188).
Interacts With:
Says his book interacts with Foucault in that both are interested in power and the way it is subverted.
In his focus on small everyday acts, does this connect to the Situationists at all?
Supposedly he was one of the forerunners of "power of the consumer" resistance idea, idea that small acts can be subversive and powerful. Apparently marked a turning point away from focus on the producer and to the consumer. Seen as radical.
Most every book on Janet's list that deals with resistance and re-appropriation/flexibility of meaning. Basically any book that talks about the ability of the consumer to create their own meaning from what they're given. Focus is on the consumer, not the producer.
Fiske (Understanding Popular Culture), Lefebvre, Bourdieu
Supposedly also refutes Bourdieu's idea that people are passive prisoners of the habitus and that cultural practices are used only to gain power. De Certeau says small cultural practices are ways of circumventing power. [So, his view believes more in agency that Bourdieu's does.]
The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art
The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988)
By James Clifford
Synopsis: This book examines the "postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority" - that is, "who has the authority to speak for a group's identity or authenticity?" (8). It does this by tracing the development of anthropology, and says that West can no longer consider itself to the the sole authority on 'other' cultures. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the argument that there is tension between the humanizing aspect of anthropology which seems to render things understandable (the render the strange ordinary), and the surrealist aspect which seeks to render the ordinary strange. The surrealist does this by picking up on fragments and random oddness. Clifford himself is more in favor of the surrealist approach, and writes that "A 'culture' is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions" (46). In this way, an ethnography of polyvocality should be employed. Some anthropology tries to "collect" culture, corner it, and categorize it, and label the non-Western as primitive artifacts always on the verge of disappearing.
Interesting Specifics:
Participant observation began around the 1940s.
"Ethnography is an explicit from of cultural critique sharing radical perspectives with dada and surrealism" (12).
"The West can no longer present itself as the unique purveyor of anthropological knowledge about others" (22).
"A 'culture' is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions" (46).
Clifford equates surrealism with ethnography because surrealism's aesthetic "values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions - that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious" (118). Seeks to provoke the unexpected (145). Culture now is all fragments and irony, and culture now as an object to be collected (120).
But, this ethnographic surrealism is different from ethnographic humanism which seeks to render culture and things comprehensible. [In this way, the two approaches can be seen as postmodernist vs. modernist].
Interacts With:
Seems to take a positive postmodern approach, without really explicitly talking about postmodernism. In this way, can be seen to interact with:
Jameson (pomo negative), Koolhaas (pomo positive), Venturi and Brown (pomo positive), Baudriliard (pomo negative, bordering on pomo neutral)
By James Clifford
Synopsis: This book examines the "postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority" - that is, "who has the authority to speak for a group's identity or authenticity?" (8). It does this by tracing the development of anthropology, and says that West can no longer consider itself to the the sole authority on 'other' cultures. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the argument that there is tension between the humanizing aspect of anthropology which seems to render things understandable (the render the strange ordinary), and the surrealist aspect which seeks to render the ordinary strange. The surrealist does this by picking up on fragments and random oddness. Clifford himself is more in favor of the surrealist approach, and writes that "A 'culture' is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions" (46). In this way, an ethnography of polyvocality should be employed. Some anthropology tries to "collect" culture, corner it, and categorize it, and label the non-Western as primitive artifacts always on the verge of disappearing.
Interesting Specifics:
Participant observation began around the 1940s.
"Ethnography is an explicit from of cultural critique sharing radical perspectives with dada and surrealism" (12).
"The West can no longer present itself as the unique purveyor of anthropological knowledge about others" (22).
"A 'culture' is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions" (46).
Clifford equates surrealism with ethnography because surrealism's aesthetic "values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions - that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious" (118). Seeks to provoke the unexpected (145). Culture now is all fragments and irony, and culture now as an object to be collected (120).
But, this ethnographic surrealism is different from ethnographic humanism which seeks to render culture and things comprehensible. [In this way, the two approaches can be seen as postmodernist vs. modernist].
Interacts With:
Seems to take a positive postmodern approach, without really explicitly talking about postmodernism. In this way, can be seen to interact with:
Jameson (pomo negative), Koolhaas (pomo positive), Venturi and Brown (pomo positive), Baudriliard (pomo negative, bordering on pomo neutral)
Saturday, March 8, 2008
The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 (1990 [1978])
By Michel Foucault
Synopsis: Asks: Why have Westerners so obsessively talked about sex since the 17th century? Also wants to know "why we burden ourselves today with so much guilt for having once made sex a sin" (9). "The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world" (11). Says that all of the repression and endless discourse surrounding sexuality has been motivated by one major concern: "to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative" (37). [I love that line! Conspiracy!] Foucault basically lays out the various ways sexuality came to be talked about and the ways it came to be controlled via its relegation to certain spheres and certain "pathologized" definitions (i.e. how it came to be cornered and contained and used as an element of power and weapon of control). Argues that in the 17th century, with an increased influence of Christianity and with the rise of the bourgeois, sex was pushed into a constant discourse and through an endless process of speech. It was not that we all became "repressed," but rather, sex was taken up and "owned" by the bourgeois and forced into very specific categories which they could then control - i.e. sex was "supposed" to be for married couples. Other types of sexuality which did not fit this category were pathologized and made deviant - and we see a rise in these "other" sexualities because of attempts to control them. The bourgeois control of sexuality focused on four categories: 1) the hysterical woman; 2) the masturbating child; 3) the Malthusian couple; 4) the perverse adult. Childhood sexuality was especially suspect and squelched, providing proof of the way sexuality was "discoursed" as a tool of power and control. Power is embedded in everything.
Interesting Specifics:
"...power is tolerable only on condition that is mask a substantial part of itself" (86).
It was in the bourgeois family that sexuality of kids and adolescents was first problematized and feminine sexuality medicalized (120).
Sex became a tool through which the body was disciplined and the population was regulated; the discussion of sex thus became a supreme form of power and control.
Interacts With:
Refutes books that deal with Victorian repression hypothesis. Foucault says it wasn't repression, it was obsession - but obsession forced into a very specific and controlled discourse.
By Michel Foucault
Synopsis: Asks: Why have Westerners so obsessively talked about sex since the 17th century? Also wants to know "why we burden ourselves today with so much guilt for having once made sex a sin" (9). "The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world" (11). Says that all of the repression and endless discourse surrounding sexuality has been motivated by one major concern: "to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative" (37). [I love that line! Conspiracy!] Foucault basically lays out the various ways sexuality came to be talked about and the ways it came to be controlled via its relegation to certain spheres and certain "pathologized" definitions (i.e. how it came to be cornered and contained and used as an element of power and weapon of control). Argues that in the 17th century, with an increased influence of Christianity and with the rise of the bourgeois, sex was pushed into a constant discourse and through an endless process of speech. It was not that we all became "repressed," but rather, sex was taken up and "owned" by the bourgeois and forced into very specific categories which they could then control - i.e. sex was "supposed" to be for married couples. Other types of sexuality which did not fit this category were pathologized and made deviant - and we see a rise in these "other" sexualities because of attempts to control them. The bourgeois control of sexuality focused on four categories: 1) the hysterical woman; 2) the masturbating child; 3) the Malthusian couple; 4) the perverse adult. Childhood sexuality was especially suspect and squelched, providing proof of the way sexuality was "discoursed" as a tool of power and control. Power is embedded in everything.
Interesting Specifics:
"...power is tolerable only on condition that is mask a substantial part of itself" (86).
It was in the bourgeois family that sexuality of kids and adolescents was first problematized and feminine sexuality medicalized (120).
Sex became a tool through which the body was disciplined and the population was regulated; the discussion of sex thus became a supreme form of power and control.
Interacts With:
Refutes books that deal with Victorian repression hypothesis. Foucault says it wasn't repression, it was obsession - but obsession forced into a very specific and controlled discourse.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Mythologies
Mythologies (1972; 1957 in French)
By Roland Barthes
Synopsis: French literary critic Barthes attempts to show the ways in which the bourgeois try to naturalize myth. Each chapter focuses on a different myth or symbol and discusses what that symbol/object has come to represent. Includes things like wrestling, fringe bangs signaling "Ancient Roman-ness," the platonic beauty of certain faces, wine, steak as symbolizing vigor, Einstein's brain as symbolizing man's triumph over nature, photos of political candidates, etc. "Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion" (129). "The naturalization of the concept...[is] the essential function of myth" (131). This is one of the goals of the bourgeois, to get people to see their ideas as true realities/facts, and not as the constructs that they are. If the bourgeois can get people to see myths as natural or as a matter of common sense, then they can control reality, in a way; can get others to believe that their (the bourgeois) system, is the naturally right and true system (this is my take on him, at least).
Interesting Specifics:
"Myth is a type of speech" (109).
Signifier + signified = sign
Signifiers: "Its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full" (124).
"Myth is always a language robbery" (131).
"Myth is depoliticized speech" (143); it purifies things and "makes them innocent" (143).
"Myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts" (143).
"The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth" (146).
There are no left-wing myths.
"The foundation of the bourgeois statement of fact is common sense, that is, truth when it stops on the arbitrary order of him who speaks it" (155).
Interacts With;
Barthes is supposedly a structuralist (i.e. looks are things as eternal; ahistorical) on the cusp of poststructuralism. But, you cannot do poststructuralist myth and symbol because poststructuralism is all about being contingent on history, politics, class, conditions, etc; myth, by definition, transcends all these things.
Apparently Barthes believes that all myths are bad - no matter who wields them - because they are inherently oppressive.
"Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'"
"Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'" (1981)
By Stuart Hall
Synopsis: Popular culture is the battleground on which the struggle for power and cultural meaning is fought. Presents his theory of popular culture as an alternative to the two existing views, which claim that 1) "the people" are passive and are being duped constantly by dominant forces, or 2) there is some real or pure working-class culture that exists entirely beyond the bounds of dominant culture. He argues instead that while of course the dominant culture will have some effect, we should not look at things as being of one extreme pole or the other - i.e. of pure autonomy or of total encapsulation. Popular culture should be defined through its continuing tension with the dominant culture. It is not, after all, the content that makes it popular, but rather the "class struggle in and over culture" that makes it so. Thus, popular culture as a category is always contingent upon historical and social circumstances. Symbols and signs are never fixed in meaning throughout time, and there is no "universal popular aesthetic" - different groups can appropriate for different purposes and with different meanings. It all comes down to the popular causes versus the power-bloc, and context is everything. While always changes, the contentpower struggle is always there.
By Stuart Hall
Synopsis: Popular culture is the battleground on which the struggle for power and cultural meaning is fought. Presents his theory of popular culture as an alternative to the two existing views, which claim that 1) "the people" are passive and are being duped constantly by dominant forces, or 2) there is some real or pure working-class culture that exists entirely beyond the bounds of dominant culture. He argues instead that while of course the dominant culture will have some effect, we should not look at things as being of one extreme pole or the other - i.e. of pure autonomy or of total encapsulation. Popular culture should be defined through its continuing tension with the dominant culture. It is not, after all, the content that makes it popular, but rather the "class struggle in and over culture" that makes it so. Thus, popular culture as a category is always contingent upon historical and social circumstances. Symbols and signs are never fixed in meaning throughout time, and there is no "universal popular aesthetic" - different groups can appropriate for different purposes and with different meanings. It all comes down to the popular causes versus the power-bloc, and context is everything. While always changes, the contentpower struggle is always there.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
"Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape"
"Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape" (Dec. 1996)
By Kenneth R. Olwig, (article in Annals)
Synopsis: Shows that the concept of "landscape" in geography is seen as both its most important contribution, andone of its more contested ones. He argues that the term can still be useful today, and is perhaps best understood as "a nexus of community, justice, nature, and environmental equity" (631). Spends a lot of time on the etymology of "landscape," especially as connected through the German Landschaft, and also traces its use in Old Europe. Main argument seems to be that even landscape as scenery is never devoid of cultural and historical meaning. Viewing landscape both reflects and shapes out views of the world. Argues that the American geography use of "landscape"is a mix of the British scenic idea and the "German romantic ideas concerning the relation of culture to nature as expressed in the physical landscape" (645). We should study landscape as more than a scenic text - we need a substantive understanding that recognizes the interplay of city and country, culture, law, etc.
Interesting Specifics:
Excruciatingly dull
The origin of "landscape" is Landschaft (German).
The construction of landscape in art influenced the way the English court saw itself in relation to the country (636).
The science of surveying helped pave the way for the commodification of land into private property parcels (638).
"Rural landscaping created the scenic image of the country community ideal, while helping to undermine the customary law upon which it was based" (640).
"The scenic concept of landscape provided both the template for the transformation of l and into natural parks and the world view or picture that became the mark of education for the ruling elite" (640).
The "Jena circle" was a group of German artists "characterized by a 'universal romanticism' that sought a holistic conception of art, science, and natural law" (641).
Interacts With:
Says new cultural geography is British oriented.
Supposedly, Landschaft geography is very important to the field, and Sauer started this ball rolling.
Seems to interact with Price and Lewis's little squabbling piece about the methods and approaches of geography today. Also interacts with the articles that were in response to that one.
[Apparently I thought that this article seemed to defend Sauer against New Cultural Geography attacks.]
By Kenneth R. Olwig, (article in Annals)
Synopsis: Shows that the concept of "landscape" in geography is seen as both its most important contribution, andone of its more contested ones. He argues that the term can still be useful today, and is perhaps best understood as "a nexus of community, justice, nature, and environmental equity" (631). Spends a lot of time on the etymology of "landscape," especially as connected through the German Landschaft, and also traces its use in Old Europe. Main argument seems to be that even landscape as scenery is never devoid of cultural and historical meaning. Viewing landscape both reflects and shapes out views of the world. Argues that the American geography use of "landscape"is a mix of the British scenic idea and the "German romantic ideas concerning the relation of culture to nature as expressed in the physical landscape" (645). We should study landscape as more than a scenic text - we need a substantive understanding that recognizes the interplay of city and country, culture, law, etc.
Interesting Specifics:
Excruciatingly dull
The origin of "landscape" is Landschaft (German).
The construction of landscape in art influenced the way the English court saw itself in relation to the country (636).
The science of surveying helped pave the way for the commodification of land into private property parcels (638).
"Rural landscaping created the scenic image of the country community ideal, while helping to undermine the customary law upon which it was based" (640).
"The scenic concept of landscape provided both the template for the transformation of l and into natural parks and the world view or picture that became the mark of education for the ruling elite" (640).
The "Jena circle" was a group of German artists "characterized by a 'universal romanticism' that sought a holistic conception of art, science, and natural law" (641).
Interacts With:
Says new cultural geography is British oriented.
Supposedly, Landschaft geography is very important to the field, and Sauer started this ball rolling.
Seems to interact with Price and Lewis's little squabbling piece about the methods and approaches of geography today. Also interacts with the articles that were in response to that one.
[Apparently I thought that this article seemed to defend Sauer against New Cultural Geography attacks.]
The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape
The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (1996)
By Don Mitchell
Synopsis: "This book explores...the connection between the material production of landscape and the production of landscape representations, between work and the 'exercise of the imagination'..."(1). It basically seeks to "connect the shape of the CA landscape to the process of work that made it...and to wed a literature on landscape with that on labor history" (ix). One of main purposes is to interrogate the difference between representation and reality, and to put the reality of labor specifically back in to our understanding of landscape. Book begins around 1913 and travels through to 1930s through a series of vignettes and discussions of various bad working conditions, workers revolts, and the various attempts to disempower workers. Argument is that in order to make something a landscape, the work and labor behind it must be erased (and this has been particularly true of California which was created as a rural agricultural idyll). Landscape is thus inseparable from capitalist geographies based on commodifications of the land. Pain and work is hidden to produce a pretty image. California is shorthand for American Dream. Mitchell wants to reinsert workers' lives into the landscapes, highlighting their struggles. This is a Marxist labor history of California.
Interesting Specifics:
This book is essentially a labor history of the California landscape.
Follows Denis Cosgrove's line of thinking in that the history of landscape was "inseparable from the construction of capitalist geographies based on the full commodification of the land...and the subsequent need to represent ownership (or non-ownership) as a natural order of society" (4).
Says New Cultural Geographers have gotten too wrapped-up in representation and have abandoned "traditional concerns of geographers with material form" (5).
Landscape is "both a work and an erasure of work" (6).
Takes a very Marxist approach in his belief in labor as one of the defining features of humanity.
[I don't fully understand why the production of landscape should specifically hide labor more than other types of goods. Isn't the labor process hidden from the everything?? I guess this alienation is the central point of Marxism - but anything you don't make yourself is a repository of hidden labor.]
Has a great explanation of Carl Sauer and his view of landscape, that landscape "was the sum of its morphological components" - i.e. its buildings, populations, etc - and that one could understand a people by interpreting the landscape they created (24).
Says Denis Cosgrove led the shift in geography toward ideology and image (26).
Landscape as both a thing and a process/struggle (30).
Wheatland Riots of 1913 resulted when Durst farm workers rioted due to horrid living and working conditions; served to made workers visible and to bring labor problems to the public eye. Led to the formation of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing. The CCIH also held to the belief that bad environments led "triggered" innate bad genetic behavior, so they sought to "environmentally correct" for any such "outbreaks." Sought to hinder the anonymous mobility of workers (so common to the rotating crop pattern of CA) by watching them and increasing their feelings of accountability. A way to strip the power of mobility.
In CA, workers have to remain extremely militant in order not to be naturalized into the landscape.
Interacts With:
Ed Soja, Denis Cosgrove, William Cronon (Changes in the Land), "The Reinvention of Cultural Geography,"
This is a corrective both of "new cultural geography" and its focus on image, and of the "old" cultural geography of Sauer and its obsession with untheoretical morphology.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction
Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (2000)
By Don Mitchell
Synopsis: This book seeks to explore the "culture wars" and the way culture, power, and place are constructed and intertwined. Provides a strong overview of the evolution of cultural geography as a discipline while also discussing the rise of cultural studies. This book itself focuses on the materialist, cultural side of things, that material existence is what determines consciousness (Marxism). Says that culture is a site of struggle, and cultural hegemony is the way the dominant group tries to make their own way seem "natural." Culture is also basically the way people make sense of what they're doing. Also discusses the cultural and spatial turn of the 1980s, the realization that culture is spatial. Bottom line: Cultural geography is cultural politics.
Interesting Specifics:
"...the 'work of culture' is to advance social reproduction (or societal integration) through the making and unmaking of differences" (88).
"Through the landscape, politics is fully aestheticized" (139).
Landscapes are "places where discourse and material practices meet - where acts of representation...and the material acts of living...inevitably intersect" (143).
The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart and "flourished under the direction of Stuart Hall in the 1970s" (49).
By Don Mitchell
Synopsis: This book seeks to explore the "culture wars" and the way culture, power, and place are constructed and intertwined. Provides a strong overview of the evolution of cultural geography as a discipline while also discussing the rise of cultural studies. This book itself focuses on the materialist, cultural side of things, that material existence is what determines consciousness (Marxism). Says that culture is a site of struggle, and cultural hegemony is the way the dominant group tries to make their own way seem "natural." Culture is also basically the way people make sense of what they're doing. Also discusses the cultural and spatial turn of the 1980s, the realization that culture is spatial. Bottom line: Cultural geography is cultural politics.
Interesting Specifics:
"...the 'work of culture' is to advance social reproduction (or societal integration) through the making and unmaking of differences" (88).
"Through the landscape, politics is fully aestheticized" (139).
Landscapes are "places where discourse and material practices meet - where acts of representation...and the material acts of living...inevitably intersect" (143).
The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart and "flourished under the direction of Stuart Hall in the 1970s" (49).
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space
Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (2004)
By Margaret Kohn
Synopsis: Public life and public space has been increasingly co-opted and usurped by private interests. We should not let out private needs (i.e. need to be left alone, to not be challenged) boil over into the public realm (42). In other words, the public realm should be a zone full of differing interests and views and challenges, and should not just be an extension of out cozy and conflict/challenge-free private realms. Residential Community Associations appear to be a way to get involved with your community, but they really do not encourage interaction within a wider social world or encourage participation as wider citizens (120). She feels there's a difference between the desire for community - which is based on a small-town coziness defined by similar interests and values - and public spiritidness - which "invokes sharing with those who are different" (194). People need a public realm in which they can be exposed to difference.
Interesting Specifics:
1972: Lloyd vs. Tanner rules shopping malls are not free speech zones.
1992: Supreme Court case of Lee vs. Krishna Consciousness rules that airports are not free-speech zones.
We need truly public space because it alerts us to "the irrationalities produced by our society;" to the fact that "our truths are not universal" (59). [I think this is one of her most important parts, and would should the value in looking and in general contact. Is very very Richard Sennett-y; she must have read him.]
Engages With:
Richard Sennett (The Uses of Disorder), Behind the Gates, Celebration Chronicles, Landscapes of Power
By Margaret Kohn
Synopsis: Public life and public space has been increasingly co-opted and usurped by private interests. We should not let out private needs (i.e. need to be left alone, to not be challenged) boil over into the public realm (42). In other words, the public realm should be a zone full of differing interests and views and challenges, and should not just be an extension of out cozy and conflict/challenge-free private realms. Residential Community Associations appear to be a way to get involved with your community, but they really do not encourage interaction within a wider social world or encourage participation as wider citizens (120). She feels there's a difference between the desire for community - which is based on a small-town coziness defined by similar interests and values - and public spiritidness - which "invokes sharing with those who are different" (194). People need a public realm in which they can be exposed to difference.
Interesting Specifics:
1972: Lloyd vs. Tanner rules shopping malls are not free speech zones.
1992: Supreme Court case of Lee vs. Krishna Consciousness rules that airports are not free-speech zones.
We need truly public space because it alerts us to "the irrationalities produced by our society;" to the fact that "our truths are not universal" (59). [I think this is one of her most important parts, and would should the value in looking and in general contact. Is very very Richard Sennett-y; she must have read him.]
Engages With:
Richard Sennett (The Uses of Disorder), Behind the Gates, Celebration Chronicles, Landscapes of Power
Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World
Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World
By Sharon Zukin, 1991
Synopsis: In exploring the interrelationship between market and place, Zukin examines five twentieth-century landscapes to investigate "the spectrum of change between deindustrialization and the shift to a postindustrial or service economy" (23). Landscape is an expression of cultural value (and we thus appear to value capitalism). She argues that the "dominant source of social meaning [has moved] from production to consumption" (57), and this is reflected in the landscape. She discusses steel towns and their paternalistic vibe; Westchester County as a recently suburbanized office park zone after many companies relocated there (shows development of an upwardly-mobile class of consumption post-deindustrialization); L.A. and Miami, though landscapes "explicitly produced for visual consumption" (219), are in fact real cities, though "built on the power of dreamscape, collective fantasy, and facade" (219); Disney World hotels as focused sites of consumption. Bottom line seems to be that consumption rather than production is the dominant force now, and we need to start talking about citizenship instead of just consumerism.
Interesting Specifics:
Culled together from a few different people, Zukin says: "Taking 'ordinary landscape' to be the 'continuous surface all around us,' cultural geographers 'regard all landscapes as symbolic, as expressions of cultural values, social behavior, and individual actions worked upon particular localities over a span of time,'" (18).
"But in the struggle for expansion in the built environment, and control over the uses of space, economic power predominates over both the state and vernacular culture. 'Capital creates and destroys its own landscape'" (19).
Says gentrification is about the search for the "authentic," an attempt "to recapture the value of place" (192) by viewing urban centers/decay in the way people had viewed landscape.
Gentrification creates " 'islands of renewal in seas of decay'" (188).
L.A. and Miami are what we think the future will look like (220).
"The organization of consumption is a powerful means of carrying out creative destruction in the economy" (259).
"Because landscape is the most important product of both power and imagination, it is the major cultural product of our time" (268).
By Sharon Zukin, 1991
Synopsis: In exploring the interrelationship between market and place, Zukin examines five twentieth-century landscapes to investigate "the spectrum of change between deindustrialization and the shift to a postindustrial or service economy" (23). Landscape is an expression of cultural value (and we thus appear to value capitalism). She argues that the "dominant source of social meaning [has moved] from production to consumption" (57), and this is reflected in the landscape. She discusses steel towns and their paternalistic vibe; Westchester County as a recently suburbanized office park zone after many companies relocated there (shows development of an upwardly-mobile class of consumption post-deindustrialization); L.A. and Miami, though landscapes "explicitly produced for visual consumption" (219), are in fact real cities, though "built on the power of dreamscape, collective fantasy, and facade" (219); Disney World hotels as focused sites of consumption. Bottom line seems to be that consumption rather than production is the dominant force now, and we need to start talking about citizenship instead of just consumerism.
Interesting Specifics:
Culled together from a few different people, Zukin says: "Taking 'ordinary landscape' to be the 'continuous surface all around us,' cultural geographers 'regard all landscapes as symbolic, as expressions of cultural values, social behavior, and individual actions worked upon particular localities over a span of time,'" (18).
"But in the struggle for expansion in the built environment, and control over the uses of space, economic power predominates over both the state and vernacular culture. 'Capital creates and destroys its own landscape'" (19).
Says gentrification is about the search for the "authentic," an attempt "to recapture the value of place" (192) by viewing urban centers/decay in the way people had viewed landscape.
Gentrification creates " 'islands of renewal in seas of decay'" (188).
L.A. and Miami are what we think the future will look like (220).
"The organization of consumption is a powerful means of carrying out creative destruction in the economy" (259).
"Because landscape is the most important product of both power and imagination, it is the major cultural product of our time" (268).
In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression
In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression
By Tim Cresswell (1996)
Synopsis: Looks at the ways space and place are used to construct normativity and "common sense," and shows that transgression of space can be a tool with which to question the normative world. This book is thus an examination of the "the way in which ideas about what is right, just, and appropriate are transmitted through space and place" (8). Place and geography are thus crucial in out understandings of social relations as "social power and social resistance are always already spatial" (11). Prefers the term transgression to "resistance" as resistance implies intentionality. Focuses on three case studies: graffiti in NYC in the 1970s (representing disorder and madness and disease); hippies converging on Stonehenge (transgressive mobility, blurs line between home and work and leisure, indecent because decency implies property ownership); Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (a group of women set-up a protest site outside a military base and weapons site; media focused on the "horrible stench" and "dirtiness" of the women there - clearly they had transgressed social bounds in some way). Basically, "transgressive events prompt responses that define and seek to reproduce established geographies" (104).
Interesting Specifics:
"Society produces space and space reproduces society" (12).
Cresswell considers himself part of the new cultural geography.
"'Dirt,' then, is a mismatch of meanings - meanings that are erroneously positioned in relation to other things" (38). "Dirt" is something that is out of place.
"Mobility as a way of life involves being permanently out of place" (95).
"...place, as a phenomenological-experiential entity combines elements of nature (elemental forces), social relations (class, gender, and so on), and meaning (the mind, ideas, symbols)" (157). Place always combines all three elements, in that it links action and thought, concrete and abstract.
"The unintended consequence of making space a means of control is to simultaneously make it a site of resistance" (163).
By Tim Cresswell (1996)
Synopsis: Looks at the ways space and place are used to construct normativity and "common sense," and shows that transgression of space can be a tool with which to question the normative world. This book is thus an examination of the "the way in which ideas about what is right, just, and appropriate are transmitted through space and place" (8). Place and geography are thus crucial in out understandings of social relations as "social power and social resistance are always already spatial" (11). Prefers the term transgression to "resistance" as resistance implies intentionality. Focuses on three case studies: graffiti in NYC in the 1970s (representing disorder and madness and disease); hippies converging on Stonehenge (transgressive mobility, blurs line between home and work and leisure, indecent because decency implies property ownership); Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (a group of women set-up a protest site outside a military base and weapons site; media focused on the "horrible stench" and "dirtiness" of the women there - clearly they had transgressed social bounds in some way). Basically, "transgressive events prompt responses that define and seek to reproduce established geographies" (104).
Interesting Specifics:
"Society produces space and space reproduces society" (12).
Cresswell considers himself part of the new cultural geography.
"'Dirt,' then, is a mismatch of meanings - meanings that are erroneously positioned in relation to other things" (38). "Dirt" is something that is out of place.
"Mobility as a way of life involves being permanently out of place" (95).
"...place, as a phenomenological-experiential entity combines elements of nature (elemental forces), social relations (class, gender, and so on), and meaning (the mind, ideas, symbols)" (157). Place always combines all three elements, in that it links action and thought, concrete and abstract.
"The unintended consequence of making space a means of control is to simultaneously make it a site of resistance" (163).
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