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.

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982)
By Marshall Berman

Synopsis: Basic question is: How can we learn from the modernisms of the past, and draw from their vital and exciting energies to re-ignite a world of connection, meaning, and vibrant understanding today? Defines modernism as "the struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world" (6). Modernism is both exciting in its maelstrom form, and potentially destructive, so we must learn how to make meaning from it, and one way of doing this is through analyzing modernism's pasts. Examines Faust; Marx as a guy fascinated by energy and potential of modern capitalism but angry that the result was only oppression and the chasing of money; Baudelaire and the excitement of the Parisian boulevard; St. Petersberg as an "underdeveloped" anti-modern modern place and the Nevsky Prospect - with its jumble of classes - as the embodiment of modernity; New York and Robert Moses (and his jackassery) and the optimism of Jane Jacobs. Each example highlights notion that modernity should be all about the maelstrom. This is a slight reworking of Marxist ideas, and shows Marx was excited about potential of modernist energy and creation. Berman perhaps has presentist concerns in mind, perhaps over how to reinvigorate our political culture of apathy and to reignite a vital sense of urbanism and public space. Tone is definitely romantic and optimistic and even utopian, and seeks to rescue us from postmodern ennui and cynicism.

Interesting Specifics:
Modernity promises both boundless adventure, growth, and transformation - and the threat to destroy all of this (15).

Boulevards created a powerful stage on which to be "private in public" (152).

Interacts With:

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).

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).

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.