Place: A Short Introduction

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).

Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image

Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (1999)
By Erika Doss

Synopsis: This book asks: Why is Elvis everywhere, why does he remain so popular, and what makes an American icon? To determine this, the book aims "to explore and analyze the meaning of Elvis Presley's image - his face and his body - in contemporary American culture" (25). Doss looks at various aspects of Elvis' image and fandom from quasi-religious shrines to his sexual power (as androgynous and erotic), to his racialization and "whiteness," to questions of ownership over his image. Argues that because we live in a predominantly visual culture, pictures and their materiality hold a tremendous amount of power, a power many have failed to analyze. Elvis has remained such a powerful icon because of his images' "unrestricted ambiguity and instability, its diversity and illegibility - and because Americans have never stopped arguing about what Elvis means and what he represents" (252-53). This multiplicity of meaning is essential to maintaining interest and vitality/relevance. Elvis Presley Enterprises is thus foolish for trying to control and sanitize Elvis' image. This desire for aesthetic control speaks to class bias. The discussion of Elvis' body and sexuality is one of the most interesting in the book, and states that his body/sexuality represents "the desire for integration and fullness in lives circumscribed by separation, dissolution, and alienation" (148). [This last line is a buzz-line favorite of the modernity people - but is this feeling of alienation just a part of the human condition, rather than a particular symptom of modernity? And if this "dislocation" has been going on since the rise of urbanization in the 1820s, shouldn't we have come up with coping mechanisms by now? This is all starting to feel a bit adolescent.]

Interacts With:

Kitsch,
Any book on Janet's list that discusses flexibility of meaning and the importance of multivocality; things seem to gain importance and value in exact proportion that their meaning is contestable and fluid.

Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture

Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993)
By William Leach

Synopsis: This book is an examination of the "crucial formative years" of the rise of consumer culture (1880-1930), and asks how that culture first came into being, and what was gained, lost, and/or repressed in that process (xiii-iv). Examines archives, newspapers, diaries, etc, and divides the book into three parts: Part I: Strategies of Enticement (rise of department stores and of the "commercial aesthetic" which relied on glass, color, and light; rise of fancy display windows and of the visual; rise of themes and of children's clothes/toys; rise of orientalism; rise of the importance of service, atmosphere, and comfort; rise of the separation of production from consumption); Part II: Circuits of Power (examines the many institutions aiding the rise of consumer culture - commercial art schools, colleges and universities, urban museums, federal and municipal governments, and religion; rise of mind cure and sunny optimism; Wizard of Oz; world without suffering); Part III: Managing a Dream Culture: 1922-1932 (establishment of "consumptionism" by 1920; American obsession with defending the "standard of living;" flood of consumer goods and rise of chain stores and mergers; "luxury" loses its negative connotations; rise of spectacle and elaborate designs; Herbert Hoover and his advocacy of single family homes and govt. role in making big business even more efficient/profitable - creation of "a new institutional bureaucratic language of consumption). Leach argues that consumer culture is nonconsensual, and is not produced by the people but by commercial groups and elites obsessed with profit, promoting only one vision of the good life while pushing out all others. This was the rise of a new commercial aesthetic that advocated a culture of longing and desire. It ushered in a one-sided, capitalist concept of the self and perpetuated the myth of the separate consumer world as a realm of freedom, self-expression, and fulfillment.

Interesting Specifics:

The cardinal features of this new consumer culture are/were: "acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society" (3).

In the 1910s, there were massive fears over U.S. "overproduction" of goods, hence the desire for new ways to get people to buy more stuff.

The commercial aesthetic was all about the use of color, glass, and light to sell goods (40).

Rise of the show window = 1889.

1890s = proliferation of the use of glass and window displays to sell goods, marking an increased focus on the visual and a decline in the use of touch and smell which had been such a part of open-air markets (62-63). Display glass enticed viewers: "Here is is, everywhere you go, yet you cannot reach it" (63).

By 1915 the "central theme" idea unifying many rooms/spaces was standardized for "theatre owners, restauranteurs, and department store retailers with which to design adult fantasy environments" (82). Rooftop gardens were themed starting in late 1890s.

1900 = rise of tipping in restaurants

The rise of the service/comfort industries had some roots in hospitality of Christianity, and was seen as the comforting and benevolent side of capitalism (146).

Increased separation between production and consumption made it easier to deny any suffering inherent in capitalism, hence "The outcome was a greater tendency toward selfishness and a corrosive moral indifference" (150). [Geez, this guy is really moralistic - Pretty old-school].

"A comfortable gentility, fearful of emotional extremes and of public embarrassment, but capable of consumer extravagance" was the hallmark of American urban/suburban life (page?)

1912 = Eleanor Porter's Pollyanna

1923 = John Powers founds the first successful modeling agency

1920s = increased focus on color and light

"...the conception of the desiring self, as expressed and exploited by capitalism, offers a one-sided and flawed notion of what it means to be human" (385).

"But however flawed, the capitalist concept of self, the consumer concept of the self, is the reigning American concept" (386).

Interacts With:

Wow, he is very negative on consumer culture. He takes the non-pop culture approach and seems to look at consumption as a top-down thing, without seeing the potential liberatory powers of bottom-up flexibility of meaning, use, and purpose. Seems to view consumer culture as simply manipulation and exploitation. In this way, differs greatly from Meaning of Things and the material culture book that see consumption and things as a tool of social value. Really does fit with the angry tone of Country of Exiles. I still feel that such books are important, because at least they arouse passions in some way, and get people going.
No Place of Grace, Design in the U.S.A.
Class, Rudeness and Civility, Urban Masses and Moral Order, Reading the Romance (again, any books that deal with middle class comfort obsession. But was it really only the middle classes which were obsessed with comfort, or was it just that they were the ones with the means to achieve comfort??)
Culture of Narcissism (for its moralistic shaming of "selfish" American and consumer culture).

Design in the U.S.A.

Design in the U.S.A. (2005)
By Jeffrey L. Meikle

Synopsis: "The purpose of this book is to trace the history of design in the U.S. as a functional tool, as an economic force, and as the expression of a consumer culture that continues to transform everyday life" (17). It traces the history of U.S. design from 1790-present, and is divided into five sections: 1) The Emergence of the American System, 1790-1860 (increased urbanization at the end of this period; Americans had democratic passion for physical comforts that influenced design; 1853 NY Exhibition showed fanciness that would soon be available to the middle class too); 2) Art and Industry in the Gilded Age, 1860-1918 (rise of visual appearance over touch-based production; increased focus on taste and personal expression; aesthetic vs. moral views of design; Arts and Crafts Movement, 1880s - ); 3) Designing the Machine Age, 1918-1940 (birth of the industrial design profession in 1930s; rise of streamlining = desire for a less complex world; increased mobility and efficiency); 4) High Design vs. Popular Styling, 1940-1965 (rise of functionalism; rise of populuxe; shift from material to immaterial existence); 5) Into the Millennium: Moving Beyond Modernism (fracturing of any single design vision; playful mixing of postmodern style; information age as extension of modernity). Most interesting argument (as this book is more of a survey as opposed to an argument-driven book) is that the increased malleability of everything in the information age (today) and the increased catering to a multitude of subcultures marks the dissolution of the "modernist vision of rational, universal coherence" (210). American design is largely about the massive proliferation of stuff.

Interesting Specifics:

"...The democratic pursuit of happiness was related to an increasing flow of material goods - all of them products of design" (12).

It is said that design imposes order - but whose order, and for what purposes? (15-16)

Catherine Beecher = 1800-78

Transcontinental Railroad Completed = 1869

Model T Ford = 1908

Frederick Taylor = 1856-1915

Ford shuts down River Rouge plant in 1927.

Fiestaware = 1930s

Journal Industrial Design launched in 1954.

1960s = shift from a material to immaterial world (information age - isnt' this also when "postmodernism" began?)

Defines what it means to be a consumer: "how to invest time and energy in shopping, how to gain emotional release by acquiring material things, and how to construct and express personal identity by arranging and displaying possessions" (52).

"Visual appearance...assumed greater economic and cultural significance, as a 'touch-oriented, local world of production' yielded to a 'sight-oriented, broader world of consumption'" (52).

There were two schools of British design philosophy - the aesthetic and the moral - "one advocating design as a source of visual and tactile pleasure, the other as a source of moral reform" (67).

Tiffany lamp craze was in the 1900s.

Arts and Crafts Movement big in 1880s-1900s.

Stickley started making mission style furniture in 1902.

Industrial design profession emerged in the 1930s.

Streamlining "represented a common assumption that society's larger processes had to be rendered smoother, less complex, more frictionless in operation" (125). Also, "its rounded, enclosing forms, particularly when applied to architecture, suggested a need for protection and stability" (125).

Ford Taurus as radical design breakthrough, and car historians regard it as "'the single most important American production design of the 1980s'" (191).

Says Learning from Las Vegas (1972) launched the postmodern movement (192). [Hmm, don't others say it was a little earlier? Maybe it's that these guys were the first to really defend it and make it a "taste of the people" movement to embrace - ]

Grid was the first laptop.

Interacts With:

Rudeness and Civility, Class (any book that deals with middle class obsession with comfort)
Meaning of Things
Land of Desire (focus on the rise of the visual)
Did consumer culture kill Modernism?

"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.

"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.]

Geographical Imaginations

Geographical Imaginations
By Derek Gregory (1994)

Synopsis: This book details various episodes in the history of geography and does so by showing the ways they interact with other histories. It also focuses on "the problematic of visualization," or the way in which sight has come to dominate the modern era (15-16). By the end of the nineteenth century, it was common for "European ways of knowing to render things as objects to be viewed " (34), which basically served to create a distance between the observer and the observed - a main definer of modernity. His book focuses mostly on a history of different understandings of space. Spends some time on postmodern thinkers as well. Talks a lot about Harvey (actually seems to summarize a lot of his work) and criticizes him for being too Western-centric and lacking in feminist perspective. Talks also about Lefebvre and his view that the visual has taken over, leaving an absence of any bodily dimension (392). Ends with idea that we need to come up with a more holistic and true human geography.

Interesting Specifics:

Says David Harvey and others view Haussmann's redo of Paris as a triumph of bourgeois values, making the public spaces akin to bourgeois private spaces (222).

The Production of Space

The Production of Space (1991) [1974]
By Henri Lefebvre

Synopsis: Wants to bridge the gap between mental space, real/physical space, and social space, and thus is looking for a unitary theory of mental, physical, and social space which would break down the barriers between the various kinds of spaces (21). Spatial practice, representation of space, and representational space all work to form the perceived-conceived-lived triad (40). Space is intertwined with social processes, and social space is "a materialization of 'social being'" (102). Capitalism has fucked things up because it has compartmentalized and separated the various types of spaces, following the logic of the way we separate the forms of labor and production. Dominated space = space transformed by technology and practice; appropriated space = space adapted to the needs of the groups; abstract space = reduces all space to signs and symbols, thus obscuring the reality of the space - it's a tool of domination and it's the logic of state-imposed, destructive force. Therefore, to transform society we must transform space; we must move from the production of things (capitalism), to the production of space (with a decrease in private ownership). He wants to increase a sense of holism and unity in a world that has been fractured and compartmentalized and fethishized, and wants an organic, bottom-up space of the people. This book is heavily influenced by Marxism, and today is loved by postmodern geographers like Soja and Dear. Is a critique of poststructuralism, structuralism, and logocentrism. Lefebvre was a communist and socialist and Situationist. Believes in the revolutionary potential of space.

Specifics:

Sight has nearly totally eclipsed all the other senses due to our obsession with and prioritizing of signs and language (logocentrism) (139).

"To change life we must first change space" (190).

Modern life has caused a fracturing of the body into separate, disconnected parts (205).

"...absolute space is located nowhere. It has no place because it embodies all places, and has a strictly symbolic existence" (256).

Parts of the city are sexualized, just as certain zones of leisure are sexualized (310).

The bourgeois apartment has been stripped of eros (315).

Lefebvre was part of the Situationist movement.