673 Place and Space Wiki



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Carceral Spaces
By Josh MacGregor

In the entry on "carceral geographies," The Dictionary of Human Geography defines as carceral those spaces in which "individuals are confined, subject to surveillance or otherwise deprived of essential freedoms." I use this definition as a jumping-off point for this discussion of carceral space insofar as it strikes me as productive but nonetheless limited in its scope. In this account, the central properties of carceral space are identified in terms of surveillance, confinement, and a lack of certain freedoms which, at least in theory, those who dwell 'outside' the boundaries of such carceral localities presumably enjoy. These can range from the seemingly mundane, such as the freedom to choose one's own diet, to the more obviously political, such as the right to vote or the freedom to move around as one pleases (all of which, we should note, are foreclosed to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals).

While these qualities are by no means incorrect -- as constant surveillance, forced confinement/immobility, and the loss of certain liberties are indeed at the fore of the carceral tactics informing the spatiality of prisons and other, similar institutions (asylums, ICE detention facilities, and so on) -- the over-reliance on explicitly carceral spaces and localities (spaces whose carcerality is expressly written into their very programming) and a similar overemphasis on physical structures like the prison seems to me too narrow a scope to account for the full breadth of carceral spatiality.

In the final chapter of Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault advances the notion of a "carceral archipelgo" or continuum as a way of thinking through how carceral tactics of disciplinary power can be seen operating beyond the walls of the prison and even outside the formal, juridical space of the law itself. With the emergence of the carceral archipelago, Foucault tells us, "The frontiers between confinement, judicial punishment and institutions of discipline . . . already blurred in the classical age, tended to disappear . . . [constituting] a great carceral continuum that diffused pentitentiary techniques into the most innocent disciplines . . . A subtle, graduated carceral net, with compact instiutions, but also separate and diffused methods . . ." (297). Thus, for Foucault, the carceral is not something limited to expressly carceral facilities, but rather points toward various disciplinary practices and techniques of power -- least of which bears on the social production and regulation of space -- that effect a kind of "prisonization" of society, "transporting [the techniques of the penitentiary] from the penal institution to the entire social body" (298).

Taking this two understandings of the carceral together, I want to put forth a definition of carceral space that preserves this Foucauldian notion of the carceral as a set of practices and strategies of which actual walls, cameras, and cages comprise only a few crucial parts. Running the risk of contradicting the aim suggested by the title of this post, I propose that we think of the carceral as a property of (certain) spaces, a logic that informs, whether consciously or unconsciously, the sets of relations that organize a particular space and the spatiality that characterizes it. In doing so, we not only expand our understanding of carceral space beyond the physical walls of such obvious examples as the prison or the psychiatric institution, but also open up ways of thinking about the potential for resistance and subversion within such spaces, insofar as the programming or intended use of a particular space always carries with it the possibility for critical appropriation and/or "misuse" (see note 1).

Notes:

1.) Here I am indebted to the work of Jean Ulrick-Désert, who in his theorization of queer space observes that "the possibility of any space is latent until the moment it doubles and is devoured by the contradictions of its program and the actual events of its construction, use, and eventual destruction" (21). Space, in this account, always carries within it a certain elasticity or potential for subversion insofar as it can always be critically repurposed, remade, and/or transformed through a process of activation on the part of its inhabitants; a critical misuse of space for ends outside of its intended programming ("Queer Space" 21).

References:

"Carceral Geographies." The Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2009. Credo Reference. Web. 18 November 2014.

Désert, Jean-Ulrick. "Queer Space." Queers in Space: Communities / Public Places / Sites of Resistance. Eds. Ingram, Gordon Brent, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter. Seattle: Bay Press, 1997. Print.

Foucault, Michel. ''Discipline and Punish. ''Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.

City/Suburb
By Anirban Baishya

The city is one of the major sites of the study of everyday life. As the locus of transactions between governmental, mercantile and techno-cultural forces, the city has emerged as the site where “modernity” can be most easily “read”. This was especially true of thinkers of modernity such as Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin who found in the city, the raw material to dissect social life. Simmel’s work The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) is one of the pioneering works that deal with the impact of urbanization on the individual, focusing on the fragmentary and alienated experience of urban existence. Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project (1927-40), composed of fragments that ruminate on the nature of dwelling in and navigating modern Paris with its glass and iron architecture, remains a monument to the centrality of the city to critical theorists of the time.

Needless to say, the city has also been central to the cinematic imagination. This is especially true of early cinema where the fascination for the possibilities of accelerated movement and mobility seemed to mirror the technological possibilities of travel in cinema itself. A number of “city symphony” films emerged in cinema’s early period focusing on the novelties of both the city’s pluralistic sensorium and the cinema’s capacity to capture it in unprecedented ways. Some of the more famous examples of this genre include Manhatta (Dir. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921) which is a poetic take on the city of New York, juxtaposing visuals of the city with lines from the poetry of Walt Whitman, and Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) which tried to capture the rhythms of city life in Berlin. But by and far, the best known example of this genre of films is Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929), which foregrounded the comparisons between the city’s rhythm and the cinematic machinery, very strongly.



Coupled with the notion of the city is the suburb. Unlike the city, the suburb has not been as extensively studied. But nonetheless, the suburb forms an interesting component of a dialectic of space along with the city. The Encyclopaedia of Urban Studies defines suburbs as “residential zones […] beyond the city centers” that has been caused by a “decentralization of the city and the town.” The growth of suburbs has been linked not only to the increase of the inflow of population to city centers for work, but also to the rise of transportation technology. In The Oxford Companion to United States History, Jennifer L. Kalish makes this correlation particularly clear in relation to the process of suburbanization in America. She says that while the urban life in the “first half of the nineteenth century city […] was shaped by the characteristics of the walking city”, the emergence of public transport (omnibus, railways etc.) “allowed well-to-do residents to move to the city’s periphery or beyond.” Kalish also goes on to point out the importance of the automobile industry to the rapid growth of suburbanization in the 1920s to such an extent that “suburbs grew at a faster rate than the city core” whereby such travel increasingly became more private.



The relationship of the potential of motorized travel, the ownership of vehicles and the consequent ability to shuttle between the suburb and the city core makes the suburb a place that is marked by certain class characteristics. For instance, Kalish points out that post-war American suburbs were “homogenous, racially exclusive” communities composed of “typically young, white, middle-class men who commuted to the city; wives who were committed to domesticity; and young children.” While this applies specifically to American suburbs, it can be surmised that the process of suburbanization within the capitalist paradigm has been similar across the board, inviting a tight class composition that is coupled with the desire to live in the quieter, “safer” suburb rather than in the plurality of sensorial and class configurations offered up by the city.

REFERENCES

Heterotopia
By Laura Cechanowicz 

Foucault's heterotopias are places marked by the real and the unreal, potential sites of resistance which reflect and contest a multitude of sites. As Foucault writes, "... places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within a culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.  Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality" (Foucault 24).

In elaborating heterotopias, Foucault expands several principles and examples. He first establishes that it is likely all cultures fabricate heterotopias, with each culture producing their own unique iteration. Within this constant, Foucault argues there are two variations: crisis heterotopias reserved for people suffering crises, and the more modern heterotopias of deviation housing those who do not fit into the norms of society. His second principle outlines not only the specific nature of heterotopias in their time, but also that they may be redefined and utilized through time as desired. Thirdly, and this principle directly engages the cinematic screen, heterotopias are capable of juxtaposing 'several incompatible sites' in one place (25). The fourth principle involves the relationship between heterotopias and heterochronies, linking the heterotopia to slices in time or breaks in time, yet placing it outside of time: as in the museum. Additionally, the heterotopia functions with a system of 'opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them impenetrable' (26). Finally, the heterotopia is defined by having a function in relation to all other space, with that function divided one of two ways. The first states, "Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory... Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other" (27).

Foucault's elaboration of heterotopias may leave the steadiest mind spinning, however, this may be due to his unusual positioning between structuralism and post-structuralism. While Foucault frequently maps histories and modes of thinking, arguably a structuralist project, his histories also leave certain holes, lending themselves to a post-structuralist reading that seems to negate the very process of mapping patterns. While considering heterotopias, it may seem that all enviornments may be identified as heterotopias, or conversely, that no spaces are heterotopias. It is perhaps precisely in this indeterminacy that the term is productive, here I refer specifically to Kracauer's notions of contingency and indeterminacy. Foucault's concept of heterotopias may, in itself, be rather heterotopic, both absolutely real and absolutely unreal (24). In unpacking different versions of Foucault's heterotopic spaces, we may find the systems of categorization productive in unveiling the nature of place and space in any particular space. I consider heterotopias to be contested spaces ripe for dissection, rich in contradiction and functioning similarly to the aleph, the idea Soja elaborates while describing thirdspace (1986). It is the indeterminacy of the term that allows it to be a focal center for a wide range of places, sparking analysis into the special nature of charged space.

Useful resources:

http://www.heterotopiastudies.com/

Citations:

Foucault, Michel. "Texts/Contexts: Of Other Spaces." Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1. 1986, 22-27.

Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996. Michel Foucault, 1986.

Place and Space
By Maria Zalewska

We began this semester by thinking of space as a dense object that gets produced. Two of the preliminary questions we asked were: ''How does one operationalize spaces that are always already produced and productive? How does space function heuristically and what do we learn about ourselves based on our relation to spaces and places?'' The purpose of this short wiki entry is to summarize the main questions and answers, themes, and ideas covered by us throughout this semester.

As an attempt to systematize the distinction between place and space, one can begin to list some of the most general differences:


 * PLACE


 * more specific; particular
 * local/identity
 * it’s produced (not neutral)
 * it’s necessary as a precondition of human identity
 * it oscillated between different temporalities (the idea of ‘place’ brings ‘time’ back)
 * <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">SPACE


 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">multidisciplinary
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">more abstract; theoretical
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#252525;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">it’s a social product, or a complex social construction
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#252525;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">it allows one to access the duality of cinema

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Space/Place/Power 

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;">

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Edward Soja’s polemic against the long-standing distinction between history and geography critically asserts history as a temporal and spatialized discipline.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">In that context, cinema gives us the experience of simultaneity (space and time) that Soja evokes in his writings. Here, I want to quote Anirban’s post on Soja: “Space in this analysis is dynamic, changeable and produced by those who inhabit it while place denotes a certain sense of fixity in time”.

<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.15;">Foucault (in “Of Other Spaces”) discusses the notion of heterotopia. In his understanding, space is always heterogenous, for it consists of a set of relations (and not just one thing).

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Space and geographies matter to him only as far as it relates to power and knowledge.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">In his discussion of Buster Keaton’s comedies, Charles Wolfe (“From Venice to the Valley: California Slapstick and the Keaton Comedy Short”) offers a trifold breakdown of cinematic, spatial, and simultaneous layers:
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Spaces are relational
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Film is a heterotopic space
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">we live in the “epoch of the simultaneity [and] juxtaposition”

<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.15;">John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel (“Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image, ‘Introduction’”) argue that  “our experience of the moving image is intimately connected to our experience of place”. They take Edward S. Casey’s argument on the centrality of place to the constitution of subjectivity and they want to apply it idea to the study of moving images: “...place or location of the moving image is, like the place of human subjectivity, ‘at one with action and thought.’”
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">location/reality/place (particularly, historically situated site)
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">constructed space of the story world (this can be doubly layered if it’s connected to a historical reality)
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">cinematic field (our contact with this field is mediated through camera)
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Place (as a precondition of human subjectivity) is not only


 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">a constitutive force
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">but also a CONSTRUCTIVE force
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“Identity is constructed in and through place, whether by our embrace of a place, our inhabitation of a particular point in space, or by our rejection of and departure from a given place and our movement toward, adoption and inhabitation of, another”.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:bold;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Mappings of Space and Place

<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.15;">Henri Lefebvre argues that space is a social product/construction and that its transparency is an illusion; space is an actuality. One should recognize the complex and political processes of its production (space reflects the power relations embedded in every society). Pointedly, he distrusts the visual and visible in the study of space (this problematizes his argument’s applicability to the study of place and space in cinema). Therefore, cinema falls under ‘representational space’ and images belong to the incriminated medium.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">According to Lefebvre, our bodies (culturally constituted entities) navigate:

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Lastly, he argues that social relations are spatial relations and that spatial control is social control.
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">spatial practice (perceived)
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">representation of space (conceived)
 * <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">representational space (aesthetic and symbolic)

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">David Harvey lays out a trajectory of spatial theories and argues that capitalism has turned history into a geographical effort. What follows is that capitalism solves its crises by moving things around (geographical fixes). Doreen Massey, on the other hand, argues that places are not static and - just like capital- they are processes too. She states that “p <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(44,62,80);white-space:pre-wrap;">laces do not have to have boundaries in the sense of divisions which frame simple enclosures” and that they “do not have single, unique ‘identities; they are full of internal conflicts”. She adds that “the specificity of place is continually reproduced, but it is not a specificity which results from some long, internalised history. (...) It is a sense of place, an understanding of ‘its character’, which can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond. A progressive sense of place would recognise that, without being threatened by it”.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#2c3e50;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Works cited:

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.5;margin-top:11pt;margin-bottom:11pt;"><span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Places.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. <span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-style:italic;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Diacritics <span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;"> 16.1 (1986).

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.5;margin-top:11pt;margin-bottom:11pt;"><span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Gorfinkel, Elena and John David Rhodes. “Introduction: The Matter of Places.” <span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-style:italic;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image <span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2011.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.5;margin-top:11pt;margin-bottom:11pt;"><span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Lefebvre, Henri. <span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-style:italic;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">The Production of Space <span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1991.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.5;margin-top:11pt;margin-bottom:11pt;"><span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” <span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-style:italic;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Marxism Today <span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:#3a3a3a;font-weight:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;"> June 1991.

<span style="font-size:11px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(44,62,80);white-space:pre-wrap;">Wolfe, Charles. “From Venice to the Valley: California Slapstick and the Keaton Comedy Short”.

Placement
By Isaac Rooks

In discussions of space and place, “placement” invites consideration of an object being in a particular location. Placement can be deployed literally or figuratively, but essentially it refers to where a thing is situated. Yet placement can go beyond simply describing where a thing is presently located. It can suggest where something should or should not be situated.

Placement provides a foundation whose meaning can be nuanced by prefixes. If something is “em-placed,” there is a sense of belonging and stability. The thing can be imagined as being in its ‘proper’ location. If something has been “dis-placed” that stability has been disrupted. If something “re-places” something else, the spatial order has been reconfigured.

The notion that things can have a ‘proper place’ is a constructed concept. Foucault begins his discussion of heterotopias by detailing the development of Western notions of space (which he identifies as the preeminent occupation in the epoch of simultaneity). Foucault speculates that Europe, during the Middle Ages, developed a “space of emplacement, “a hierarchic ensemble of places” (22). With this sense of emplacement came a sense of stability. There was a set order that helped define the character of places. Foucault identifies the disruption of this fabricated order as “the real scandal of Galileo’s work… [it posited] an infinite, and infinitely open space…. A thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement” (23). The loss of such a basic grounding would require serious conceptual reconfigurations.

Other scholars also consider how modern developments trouble the notion that something can have a set place (and reconfigure notions of placement). Schivelbusch, writing about railroads, describes the “annihilation of space and time.” The ability to easily travel resulted in once distinct local locations “losing their inherited place, their traditional spatial-temporal presence or, as Walter Benjamin sums it up in one word, their ‘aura.’”

However, even in the modern age, place and placement have not been evacuated of meaning. Edward Casey notes: “our ‘immediate placement’ as subjects ‘counts much more than is usually imagined. More, for instance, than serving as a mere backdrop” (Gorfinkel and Rhodes ix).

Lefebvre notes: “the spatial practice of a society is revealed through the deciphering of its space” (38). Interrogating the (im)proper placement of something can illuminate elements of place’s social construction and its ideological implications. To use an illustrative example, one of the defining characteristics of a ‘pest’ relates to it being out of its ‘proper’ place. A bug outside the house – fair enough. A bug inside the house – that’s a problem. One can see a toxic extension of this basic notion in contemporary immigration debates.

So far, in this short post, the focus has mostly been on the reactionary or socially hegemonic connotations of placement. However, placement carries no set ideological inflection. Doreen Massey posits a strong sense of local placement as a means of resistance. Massey tweaks Schivelbusch’s assessment of modernity, describing an “annihilation of space by time,” an unevenly experienced loss of grounding (24, emphasis added). In opposition to this, she attempts a progressive reclamation of ‘local’ communities and senses of belonging, avoiding misinterpreting places as having homogeneous identities. Instead, Massey’s conception draws attention to the multi-faceted and interconnected potential of these local places. Massey conceptualizes placement not as an exclusionary practice, but a potential avenue for solidarity among diverse underprivileged groups recognizing shared senses of attachment.

(Isaac Rooks)

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Places.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.

Gorfinkel, Elena and John David Rhodes. “Introduction: The Matter of Places.” Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2011: vii-xxix.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1991.

Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” Marxism Today June 1991: 24-29.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Oakland: U California Press, 2014. Kindle file.

Public/Private Space
By Qui-Ha Nguyen

<p class="MsoNormal">The dichotomy between public and private space originated from the distinction between public and private in the Western philosophy in the old times (Weintraub,1). [1] In a broad sense, the distinction between public and private space can be explained   "[t]he sphere of private life ought to be enclosed, and have a finite, or finished, aspect. Public space, by contrast, ought to be an opening outwards” [2] (Lefebvre, 147 ). However, as Lefebvre points out, this opposition is only the seeing appearance that we are familiar with. The understanding of the distinction of public/ private space can be fully attained through a close examination of Jugen Habermas’s conception of “public sphere” and Hannah Arendt’s conception of   “public realm”

<p class="MsoNormal">According to Habermas, the public sphere emerged in the pre-modern and modern period with the wide expansion of journalism. He argues that “ [t]he bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public.” (Habermas, 26) [3] By this, he emphasizes individuals’ participation in communities. In a similar vein, Hannah Arendt’s conception of the “public realm” centers on the visibility of individuals in public places. Arendt asserts, “the space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speak and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm.” [4] Like Arendt, Habermas is also concerned with individuals’ opinion and voice in public arena. In this sense, both Habermas’s notion of “public sphere” and Arendt’s notion of “public realm” closely link to democratic citizenship.

<p class="MsoNormal">The public sphere and public space are not the same. As feminist geographer Duncan asserts, “[p]ublic spaces and public spheres often do not map neatly onto one another” [5] (Duncan, 130). However, the dichotomies of public/private space and of public/private sphere/realm have similar gender implication in their division. Female is usually associated with private space, and male is tied with public space. The relationship between gender and space is one of the main concerns of the feminist discourse.

<p class="MsoNormal">From a feminist perspective, this gender implication in the public/private s distinction reveals women’s oppression and subjugation. In many cases, women cannot work outside the home but are locked into a domestic space as a “natural” labor division. When women join a public space, discourse on women often involves threats and dangers. In the field of cinema, historically, women’s film watching practice in theaters in the early twentieth century invoked public worries about women’s morality. [6] In a global context, the mobility of women has also been considered a threat. Massey points out “women’s mobility […] is restricted, in a thousand ways, from physical violence to being ogled at or made to feel quite simply “out of place”-not by ‘capital’, but by men.” [7] Scholar Drummond lists the following authors carefully investigated the concepts of public and private space in relation to gender issues: Pateman, 1983; Duncan, 1996; Sharistanian, 1987; McDowell, 1999; Wilson, 1991; Massey, 1994; Rendell, 1998. [8]

<p class="MsoNormal">The distinction of public/private space has been challenged by the development of urbanization. Zukin (1991) [9] and Mitchell (1995) [10] both take the street as a space in between private and public space. The dichotomy between public and private space has also faced challenges from scholarship on local specificity. Researching urban space in Vietnam in post-renovation (Doi moi), Durmmon argues that the categories of public and private space in Western thought and academia do not cover the reality of public and private space in Vietnam where this distinction is blurred. [11]

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">My work significantly draws on Weintraub’s works.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [1] Weintraub, Jeff. "The theory and politics of the public/private distinction." Public and private in thought and practice: Perspectives on a grand dichotomy 1 (1997).

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [2] Lefebvre, Henri. The production of space. Vol. 142. Blackwell: Oxford, 1991.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [3] Habermas, Jürgen. The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press, 1991.

<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [4] Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Quoted from Hinchman, Lewis P., and Sandra Hinchman, eds. Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays. State University of New York Press, 1994.pp 181-2

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [5] Duncan, Nancy, ed. BodySpace: Destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality. Psychology Press, 1996.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [6] Miriam, Hansen. "Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film." (1991).

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [7] Massey, Doreen. A global sense of place. na, 1991.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [8] Drummond, Lisa BW. "Street scenes: practices of public and private space in urban Vietnam." Urban Studies 37.12 (2000): 2377-2391.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [9] Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of power: from Detroit to Disney World. Univ of California Press, 1991.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [10] Mitchell, Don. "The end of public space? People's park, definitions of the public, and democracy." Annals of the association of american geographers 85.1 (1995): 108-133.

<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:0in"> [11] Drummond, Lisa BW.

Subaltern Studies
By Zoe Portman

The term “subaltern” was coined by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist who fought against the rising Fascist movement in Italy under Mussolini. He is most known for his theory of cultural hegemony, where the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm for all classes, suggesting that the status quo is unchangeable and beneficial to all. He began using the term “subaltern” to refer to anyone who is subjugated because of race, class, gender, etc. His use of the term is broader than it ultimately became. It is similar, but not entirely synonymous to “proletariat.”

This term was adopted by the Subaltern Studies Group, which formed in the early 1980s, and took on a much more colonial resonance. Although this particular group is focused on South Asia, the broader term can refer to anyone who studies history from the margins and the bottom, focusing on the history of the oppressed, the colonized, the marginalized, as opposed to the mainstream, elite, oppressors and colonizers. Their use of the “subaltern” is linked to the colonized body, oppressed by imperial powers, meanings that were not inherent in Gramsci's more Marxist position.

The SSG has a contentious relationship with Marx, because although they are left-leaning, they find Marxism to be Eurocentric, forcing India and South Asia into a traditional western structure, as opposed to allowing for cultural and historical difference. Subaltern Studies gives the colonized figure agency, whereas nationalist, colonialist, or Marxist discourses still figure the subaltern as a member of a nation, or a class, in the sway of these larger forces.

Some of the struggles of Subaltern Studies are the very fact that the attempt to recover lost voices depends on the erasure of voices, and the figure of the subaltern is defined by his lack of autonomy. Subaltern Studies occupies an uneasy and ambivalent position, because it is attempting to engage, navigate, but simultaneously deconstruct theories of Marxism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, archival work, and the tangled history of many nations. Yet at the same time, its very broadness and applicability to many areas of study, and its challenge to the inherently Eurocentric frameworks that still guide much of post-colonial studies make it important.

Ranajit Guha was a founding figure, who wrote about peasant insurgencies in colonial India, ascribing them individual agency separate from those of Marxist forces, or forces of the nation-state, and edited the first publications of the SSG.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is another key figure, known both for her critical theory and her opaque prose. She wrote a very influential essay called, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

http://www.mcgill.ca/files/crclaw-discourse/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf

Gyan Prakash's “Subaltern Studies as Post-Colonial Criticism” is a good history of the development of Subaltern studies. He engages with many key scholars in the field, assessing their arguments in relation to the broader shifts within the field.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/sj6/prakashpostcolonialAHA.pdf

This is a good list of many resources and publications within Subaltern studies, even if it looks like a geocities website built by a ten year old in 2002.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/zohkohb0i282t94/Area%20Studies/public/subaltern/ssmap.htm

Time-Space Compression
Time-Space Compression is a term defined by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity as “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves” (240).

The term is often linked to the change of space-time conceptions associated with the rise of the Modern Era. In Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey (about the introduction of railways to nineteenth-century England), he explains that “the railroad opened up new spaces that were not as easily accessible…it did so by destroying space, namely the space between points” (37). The way the space between places was conceived was radically altered. Thus, “[w]hat was experienced as being annihilated was the traditional space-time continuum which characterized the old transport technology” (37).

But this flexible concept is also used in consideration of the wider social effects of such changes. Harvey himself writes that there has been an “intense phase of time-space compression” in the past two decades “that has had a disorienting and disruptive impact upon political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon cultural and social life” (284).

Similarly, Edward Soja’s analysis in Postmodern Geographies of space as conceived through intellectual history (especially in relation to capitalism and Marxism) is founded on time-space compression. He says that through the nineteenth-century restructuring of space and time, “the spatial organization of society was being restructured to meet the urgent demands of capitalism” (34), and so “[l]ike capitalism, the modern critique of capitalism seemed to be propelled through an annihilation of space by time” (33).

Translocal
By Jinhee Park

Translocal is currently in momentum to challenge boundaries and to invent new methodologies in studies of place and mobility, which engage with various disciplines for geography, history, area studies, cultural studies and anthropology. Translocal is one of the new terms that suggest different scales to imagine socio-spatial relations along with transregional, transpacific, and intraregional dynamics to extend the theories on transnationalism and overcome its methodological limitation.

Even though a wide range of scholarship debate on whether translocal should be under the rubric of transnational studies, translocal attempts to bring new directionality beyond the discourse based on the national. Transnatioanlism carries a long tradition on scholarship to study migration, but it was emphasized in the 1990’s with the influence of globalization and the growing mobility of people as well as cultural and economic exchange beyond the national boundaries. In spite of the attribute of de-territorialization by re-thinking on the preexisting notion on nationhood and citizenship as well as critiquing nationalist histographies, “transnational implies a ‘translation’ of national cultures which, however, are difficult to locate since most states are –at least to some degree- composed of many cultural groups.”[i] Translocal is a framework to encompass spatial interconnectedness between local to local without filtering through the national borders or institutions.

While the previous theories on transnationalism focused on de-territorialization by the economic exchange and networks crossing the national states, translocal gives emphasis to the everyday movement and the embodied experience of migrants including mobility between the locals, urban and rural spaces. Translocality intentionally blurs the dichotomy between “the global” and “the local”, “the core” and “the periphery” which embedded on the notion of transnationalism. Rather, translocality is “intermediary arrangements, fluidity and intermingling processes.”[ii] In opposition to the distinguishable hierarchy, translocal seeks on spatial interconnectedness through the movement of humans, ideas, symbols and knowledge that reveal “situatedness in mobility.”[iii] To examine “situatedness in mobility” translocal frameworks employ empirical research and trace visualization of the processes of mobility. It acknowledges the place of the local, but also consider multiple scales that spatially bounded beyond the local and recognize temporal dynamics.

In comparison to notion of uprootedness and traveling in the theories of transnationalism, translocal methodologies propose, “grounded transnationalism”[iv] which calls attention to the importance the migrant agencies that formulate complex identities based on a place and extend it further than in relation to other locales. Therefore, “localities need not necessarily be limited to the shared social relations of local histories, experiences and relations, but can connect to wider geographical histories and processes.”[v] By looking at the aspect of ‘groundness’ of the migrant agencies, translocal geographies construct possibilities to examine everyday mobility, rural-urban, inter-urban, inner-regional movement and even ‘immobile’ population who do not fit into the category of transnational migration. Non-transnational or internal mobility was neglected even though it takes large part of global migration dynamics.[vi] For example; in most African countries  “international migration sometimes involves relatively shorter distances and less social heterogeneity (…) and fewer barriers than internal migration.[vii] However, these local-to-local relations simultaneously expose the spatial interconnected with other sets of places, which exercise ‘global ethnography of place.’[viii] Therefore translocality is a  “space in which new forms of (post)national identity are constituted”[ix], “sum of phenomena which result from a multitude of circulations and transfers”[x], “Being identified with more than one location”[xi], “simultaneous situatedness across different locales”[xii] “localized context and everyday practices” through “material, spatial and embodied.”[xiii]

[i] Hoerder, Dirk. "Transnational-transregional-translocal: transcultural." Handbook of Research Methods in Migration''. 2012, p70.''

[ii] Verne, Julia. Living Translocality: Space, Culture and Economy in Contemporary Swahili Trade''. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012, p17. ''

[iii] Brickell, Katherine, and Ayona Datta, eds. Translocal geographies: Spaces, places, connections''. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2011, p3. ''

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Trager, Lillian, ed. Migration and economy: global and local dynamics. Rowman Altamira, (2005): p1-45

[vii] Kok, Pieter, ed. Migration in South and Southern Africa: dynamics and determinants. HSRC Press, 2006, p28.

[viii] Burawoy, Michael, et al. Global ethnography: Forces, connections, and imaginations in a postmodern world''. Univ of California Press, 2000.''

[ix] Mandaville, Peter. "Reading the state from elsewhere: towards an anthropology of the postnational." Review of International Studies 28.01 (2002): p204.

[x] Freitag, Ulrike, and Achim Von Oppen, eds. Translocality: the study of globalising processes from a southern perspective''. Vol. 4. Brill, 2009, p5. ''

[xi] Oakes, Tim, and Louisa Schein, eds. Translocal China: Linkages, identities and the reimagining of space''. Routledge, 2006. p8. ''

[xii] Brickell, Katherine, and Ayona Datta, eds. Translocal geographies: Spaces, places, connections''. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2011. p4. ''

[xiii] Ibid., p13.

Travel Film
By Mike LaRocco

While the phrase “travel film” is often used to categorize content, travel film exceeds the boundaries of mode and genre, crossing many production contexts: fiction, non-fiction, avant-garde, and home movies.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-0">[1]   Travel film as a practice extends beyond content into a collection of social, technical, and visual practices that recreate the sensation of travel, mobility, exploration, and discovery.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-1">[2]   Alison Griffiths characterizes travel film, like ethnographic film, as being about “an encounter.”  The difference is that travel film is about encountering a destination, as opposed to a people.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-2">[3]

Cinematically, a lineage of travel film extends from early film experiences in a variety of theatrical and non-theatrical contexts up to the present day, in large-scale IMAX theaters and motion simulation rides. Travel film can be seen emerging from other 19th century technical/visual experiences that simulate motion and mobility, especially the magic lantern illustrated travel lecture and the panorama.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-3">[4] The popularization of travel film (and travel itself) coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism, the growth of leisure time and its commercialization, and technical and transportation innovations like the railroad and automobile,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-4">[5] as well as an increased interest in ethnography, the colonization of Africa and the Asian subcontinent, and the push into the American west.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-5">[6]   As an experience, simulated travel was frequently advertised as a way of experiencing a place without the logistical difficulties and cost of actual travel, and coincided with a similar growth in other methods of representing travel, such as travel literature, photographs, postcards, etc.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-6">[7] The popularity of travel films also coincided with trends in global exploration, with much of the footage of early travel film being shot on actual expeditions to distant and unseen lands, lending the films a level of exoticism and spectacularization.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-7">[8]   As narrativization of cinema became more common, travel films often shifted their sites of reception beyond the theater space into other realms, such as schools, churches and community-based organizations.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-8">[9]

Travel films fall within a spectrum that spans from simulation to narrative immersion, each with its own particular experiential logic. The former attempt to recreate the experience of travel visually and physically, oftentimes through non-filmic sensory enhancements such as stylized viewing environments (i.e. watching a train journey in a simulated train car) and through physical manipulation of space (the train car rocking on hydraulic jacks, the sound of bells and whistles). As a film tends toward simulation, it increasingly calls to mind the space of the screening environment as well as of the film, creating a unique relationship between image, viewer, and venue.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-9">[10] The opposite end of the spectrum presents narrative films that foreground the settings and locations of the diegetic world and frequently are structured around journeys, tourism, and exploration. Even in narrative films, there exists a spectrum between the use of destinations presented for their own sake apart from the primary events of the plot, and destinations that serve the narrative more directly.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-10">[11]   Aesthetically, the look of the travel film of both types varies wildly along with its production contexts, with some being shot by professional cinematographers and others produced by nonprofessionals, such as ethnographers or amateur filmmakers.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-11">[12]

The motion and views presented in travel film are always taken from a certain literal and ideological perspective. The sites and people selected for viewing are dependent on the logic of the films, which is often to thrill and spectacularize.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-12">[13] Given the production contexts of most early (and contemporary) travel film, the sense of distance and exoticism in travel film are defined largely by Western and Judeo-Christian frameworks.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-13">[14]   Despite their real world locations, travel films selectively create idealized versions of places;<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-14">[15] they are the topos through which imaginary creations of spaces and places occur, and as such, travel films are as much about controlling their subjects as they are representations of the experience of mobility.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-15">[16]
 * 1) ↑ Ruoff, Jeff (ed.), Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 17
 * 2) ↑ Staples, Amy, “Safari Adventure: Forgotten Cinematic Journeys in Africa” in Film History 18:3 (2006), p. 392
 * 3) ↑ Griffiths, Alison, “The Untrammeled Camera: A Topos of the Expedition Film” in Film History 25:1-2 (2013), p. 102
 * 4) ↑ Barber, X. Theodore, “The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton Holmes, and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Travel Lecture” in Film History 5:1 (1993), p. 68
 * 5) ↑ Bregent-Heald, Dominique, “Vacationland: Film, Tourism, and Selling Canada 1934-1948” in Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21:2 (Fall 2012), p. 29
 * 6) ↑ Lefebvre, Martin, “On Landscape in Narrative Cinema” in Canadian Journal of Film Studies 20:1 (Spring, 2011), p. 61
 * 7) ↑ Barber, X. Theodore, “The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton Holmes, and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Travel Lecture” in Film History 5:1 (1993), p. 69
 * 8) ↑ Staples, Amy,  “Safari Adventure: Forgotten Cinematic Journeys in Africa” in Film History 18:3 (2006), p. 393
 * 9) ↑ Bregent-Heald, Dominique, “Vacationland: Film, Tourism, and Selling Canada 1934-1948” in Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21:2 (Fall 2012), p. 29
 * 10) ↑ Gauthier, Philippe, “The Movie Theater as an Institutional Space and Framework of Signification: Hale’s Tours and Film Historiography” in Film History 21:4 (2009), p. 331
 * 11) ↑ Lefebvre, Martin, “On Landscape in Narrative Cinema” in Canadian Journal of Film Studies 20:1 (Spring, 2011), pp. 65-66
 * 12) ↑ Griffiths, Alison, “The Untrammeled Camera: A Topos of the Expedition Film” in Film History 25:1-2 (2013), p. 96
 * 13) ↑ Barber, X. Theodore, “The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton Holmes, and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Travel Lecture” in Film History 5:1 (1993), p. 82
 * 14) ↑ Barber, X. Theodore, “The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton Holmes, and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Travel Lecture” in Film History 5:1 (1993), p. 76
 * 15) ↑ Peterson, Jennifer Lynn, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 3
 * 16) ↑ Staples, Amy,  “Safari Adventure: Forgotten Cinematic Journeys in Africa” in Film History 18:3 (2006), p. 407

Uncanny Spaces
By Trace Cabot

Sigmund Freud famously elaborated on the concept of the uncanny (German: Das Unheimliche, lit. “the opposite of […] belonging to the home”[1]) in his 1919 essay The Uncanny. The uncomfortable convergence of the familiar and the disturbingly alien, the spatial implications of the uncanny were investigated both in this seminal essay and by later scholars, both implicitly and explicitly, in a variety of different contexts, including architecture, colonialism, and cinema.

Uncanny Spaces in Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” (1919)
Freud opens the essay with an account of the multiple definitions, both within German and a number of foreign languages, of the uncanny. He underscores the contradictions contained within the term Heimlich, crucially noting that it can refer to both that which is: “[c]oncealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others…” [2] as well as that which is: “Friendly, intimate, homelike; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of peaceful pleasure and security as in one within the four walls of his house.” [3] The ambivalence that he takes note of in relation to these contradictory definitions already contains a spatial dimension, with the domestic space (viewed habitually, premised on its security/integrity/stability as a place [the home vs. the house]; contains the possibility of intimacy/familiarity, etc.) already containing an alien dimension (that which defies habitual viewing [or must remain unviewed]; is premised on its unclear/permeability boundaries and contingency; contains the possibility of betrayal/deceit, is contingent, etc.).[4] [5]

He explicitly takes up the spatial dimensions of the uncanny in relation to the sensation of déjà vu. Sharing a personal anecdote alongside accounts from literature:

“Once, as I was walking through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was strange to me, on a hot summer afternoon, I found myself in a quarter the character of which could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before. Other situations having in common with my adventure an involuntary return to the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other respects, also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny. As, for instance, when one is lost in a forest in high altitudes, caught, we will suppose, by the mountain mist, and when every endeavor to find the marked or familiar path ends again and again in a return to one and the same spot, recognizable by some particular landmark. Or when one wanders about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and collides for the hundredth time with the same piece of furniture...” [6]

In his proceeding analysis, he isolates involuntary repetition as the source of the sense of uncanniness within the ‘repeated’ space, linking this to the phenomenon of repetition-compulsion, wherein a trauma is repeatedly reenacted in contradiction to the pleasure principle, but instead is linked to a force: “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctive than the pleasure-principle […] [it] displace[s],” the death drive.[7] [8]

Uncanny Spaces in Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny (1992)
Anthony Vidler takes up the notion of the uncanny as a key component of the experience of modernity, using the formative role of the notion within architecture to account for modernity both spatially and historically. Like Freud, his analysis begins with the role of the home, specifically as its exists as a bourgeois imaginary, to construct the foundation for this project. Using the detective novel to ground his opening observations, he writes: “a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence; on a psychological level, its play was one of doubling, where the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more fearsome because apparently the same.”[9] He foregrounds the experience of alienation within the modern city, central to his conceptualization of the spatially uncanny, as being more than a sense of: “not belonging; it was the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized[.]” [10]

This sense of the uncanny as that which transforms familiar spaces into alien landscapes occurs not only on the localizable level of the home (or the city), but on a continental level as well. Linking the emergence of the uncanny and the death drive in Freud’s writings to: “the extension of psychoanalysis to social concerns…”[11], Vidler claims the uncanny served as the driving force behind this movement. He specifically notes the way in which:

“[t]hemes of anxiety and dread, provoked by a real or imagined sense of homeliness,” seemed particularly appropriate to a moment when, as Freud noted in 1915, the entire “homeland” of Europe, cradle and apparently secure house of western civilization, was in the process of barbaric regression; when the territorial security that had fostered the notion of a unified culture was broken, bringing a powerful disillusionment with the universal “museum” of the European “fatherland.” The site of the uncanny was now no longer confined to the house or the city, but more properly extended to the no man’s land between the trenches, or the fields of ruins left after bombardment.” [12] [13]

While his account of modernity in relation to the spatialized uncanny is interesting, Vidler is at his most fascinating in his accounts of modernist architecture in detail. His early accounts of the uncanny and its relationship to nostalgia, the long shadow of which appears over the rest of the book, remained mired in an overly Heidegerrian register (with all of its fascistic resonances) that we might contrast with his more engaging treatments of uncanny spaces as containing revolutionary possibility that he detects elsewhere in his writings.[14]  This framework places strange weight on the apparent inability of high modernist architecture to provide a satisfactory alternative to the alienation of the modern condition; the reconfiguration/manipulation of space according to politico-social ideals and novel aesthetic sensibilities continued to result in the persistence of uncanniness within the urban/domestic space. In spite of the aspirations of modernist architects to offer an alternative spatial configuration to alienated modernity: “the house [is still] no longer a home, […] a burden that has since emerged as the principal leitmotif of postmodernism.”[15]

The Colonial Uncanny/Imperial Gothic
See: H. Wittenberg, “Occult, Empire and Landscape: The Colonial Uncanny in John Buchan’s African Writings”, Sections 42-43

Works Cited [1] S. Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), Pg. 1

[2] Ibid. Pg. 3

[3] Ibid. Pg. 3

[4] Ibid. Pg. 4

[5] Mark Fisher takes up this notion in relation to cinematic space in “Memory Disorder: Interview with The Caretaker” (Collected in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures; originally published in The Wire 304, June 2009), writing: “The word ‘haunt’ and all its derivations thereof may be one of the closest English word[s] to the German ‘unheimlich’, whose polysemic connotations and etymological echoes Freud so assiduously, and so famously, unravellled in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’. Just as ‘German usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the ‘homely’) to switch to its opposite, the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the ‘unhomely’)’, so ‘haunt’ signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it. The OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word ‘haunt’ to ‘provide with a home, house.’ […] Fittingly, then, the best interpretations of [haunted house films such as] The Shining position it between melodrama and horror… In both cases, the worst Things, the real Horror, is already Inside….” (Pg. 125)

[6] S. Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), Pgs. 10-11

[7] S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Pg. 17

[8] It is important to note that the name of the death drive can be quite misleading; Slavoj Zizek notes in “Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien” that: “This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called "death drive," and one should bear in mind that "death drive" is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an "undead" urge which persist beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. This is why Freud equates death drive with the so-called "compulsion-to-repeat," an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism's death - again, like the living dead in a horror film who just go on.”

[9] A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, Pg. 3

[10] Ibid. Pg. 7

[11] Ibid. Pg. 7

[12] Ibid. Pg. 7

[13] The battlefield, with its deformed landscape, alien composition (ie. Mud contaminated with chemical weapons and deep enough that soldiers risked drowning in their combat gear should they fall off the planks lining their trenches, razor wire-lined earthen barricades, toxic clouds, the sky as a threatening void that can suddenly be filled with artillery shells or airplanes on attack runs, etc.), is of particular interest as an uncanny space in light of the role that the (pastoral, corporealized) countryside plays in the neo-Romantic Modernist formations that would serve as a central element within the fascist ideological imaginary.

[14] See: A. Vidler, “Fantasy, the Uncanny and Surrealist Theories of Architecture”, Papers of Surrealism Issue 1

[15] A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, Pg. 66

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