Space, Place, and Identity in the Digital Age

Week Three Response: Embodiment, Identity, and Space

1. What is meant by embodiment when we are talking about digital space? Where does the embodiment occur? Is it located in the actual physical body, in the digital space, or somewhere else?

2. It seems from various mentions in the two readings that we can theorize cars in a lot of different ways regarding space and place. The inside of a car can be a space or place, while simultaneously moving us from place to place. Can a car also be considered an extension of the body? How does this idea relate to viewing bodies as occupying space or even constituting a spaces or places in themselves?

3. I found the idea of “bare life” being comodified and reconstituted particularly disturbing (and recognizable in my own life), particularly in the fact that this gives those who market experiences an incentive to make attaining those experiences outside the capitalist system difficult or impossible. Thrift explains on page 74 that he does have hope in the form of performance and philosophy, but when thinking specifically about nature, what is the alternative to the complete monetization of “experiences”?

Embodiment – experiencing phenomena through physical sensations and action.

Space – an area, delimited in some way, where social interaction can occur.

Place – a location or space endowed with meaning.

Week 3 post: Farman and Thrift

Proprioception and The Body.

In the Farman piece, a section that really stood out to me was the section of proprioception, although seemingly minor, I stayed on this point for a while, thinking of ways this could be understood. A friend of mine brought up this idea of people who are sleep walking, experiencing a dream in tandem with movement, how are they situating themselves in this space? I understand that they are navigating the world, but they are unlikely to navigate it in the same way – does this complicate this idea of situating ourselves in relation to objects and people? Another scenario that we thought of was virtual reality or virtual worlds more broadly? Although my friend argued that this relationship works on a two layer rendering system, I would argue that this needs a sense of physicality – hence the idea of the senses aforementioned. Maybe I’m missing the point here or overanalyzing but this is something that got me thinking.

On page 61 of Still Life in Nearly Present Time, I have to both agree and disagree with Thrift here. The body is an object that gets filled with signs from society. We instill upon every ‘body’ our ideas about it, about them, etc. We label things for reasons many of us have no understanding. I don’t think that takes away from the experience of spatial production or the importance of the body (although he isn’t directly stating this it can be read as such). Although I do agree that the body creates space and is in constant relations with people and objects in the world (Deleuze). “Being in space means to establish diverse relationships with the things that surround our bodies (Gill 1998: 127).

Thrift addresses my issues with Lefebvre in an interesting way – talking about mental spaces. Although at the time my understanding was somewhat crude, I think I have a tendency to agree that the brain aids in the creation of space through unconscious and conscious actions. The brain receives messages or signals, interprets them, and then we (using the term very loosely) act on those interpretations. Except (from my understanding), within Thrift and Farman, both work in tandem with each other.

Weekly Post: Farman and Thrift

1. I’m curious about the ways in which locational positionality gets lost in Chapter 4. Thrift’s phenomenological description of driving certainly fits an urban experience, but doesn’t speak to driving in rural environments, where in example one might not have access to, say, the data connection necessary to make their GPS or similar software function.

2.  Thrift speaks of the increased sensorialization of goods, but the examples from his citation are primarily good one keeps long term (cars, etc.). What about the sensorialization of disposable good (that is, goods that are designed to be eventually thrown away)? If you can bear with a bit of a nerd diversion: In reading that quote, I was immediately reminded of going through back bins full of pre-bagged 90s “limited edition” comics with raised holographic covers and trading card. These items were designed to provide a unique sensory experience that only the “first and fast” buyers could access, but because the item was disposable, the only value it retained was in relation to an artificially inflated market that exceptionalized sensorialization. Since the comic’s interior and disposable nature didn’t change (despite market suggestion otherwise), sensorialization became the central source of value–despite the fact preserving this value required the item be “sealed,” rendering the sensory experience inaccessible. How do we make sense of this supposed contradiction?

3. Continuing in the same vein, it’s interesting to note that issues of access and multiple audiences/users don’t really enter into Thrift’s discussion of ergonomics and human factors work. I first encountered human factors as part of a project working on designing equitable elder housing. In many cases, elements such as those described on Page 85 were part of design as ways to make daily life “accessible.” The best humans factors work, I would argue, is specifically about designing for the broadest range of humans. How could this concern meet with Thrift’s concern regarding surveillance?

Week 3: Thrift & Farman

1) Thrift’s “bare life” makes me think of the concept buen vivir (the good life) that has been coined by indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador. Both concepts share certain similarities. For example, for Thrift bare life is the different set of actions that our cognitive self perceives but in a delayed way. It is the absolute representation of the way in which the body acts before one is conscious of the situation. Therefore, this moment is the background of the relationship between ‘nature’ and the human experience. For the indigenous communities in Bolivia, buen vivir is the state of harmony between the world of humans and the world of nature. If buen vivir is threatened by external forces (colonialism, for example), natural equilibrium is completely lost. Thrift’s warning about the way capitalist forces intend to emulate and sell some of the characteristics of ‘bare life’ makes me think of the period of colonization where the disconnection from humans from the world of nature marked the beginning of a time of violence and death. In the conclusion of chapter 3, Thrift explains that he is hopeful about the future since “there are the myriad activities which exist at the edge of the economic system which travel all the way from those who are simply looking for simple forms of exercise to those who are trying to sense something different” (p. 74). However, I think that in most cases our practices become less related to the purity of bare life and more connected to the its ‘commercial’ realm. For me, there are some practices that become naturalized and seem to be separated from economic interests. In buen vivir the only way to ‘decolonize’ the body is to turn away from the machinery of the market. Would it be possible to ‘de-capitalise’ (I think I made up a word), bare life?

2) It seems that Lefebvre and Thrift are not diametrically distant regarding the understanding of the performativity of bodies and the capacity to produce space. Also, both make a special emphasis on the importance of time in the understanding of space as the center of social relationships (although from my perspective, Thirft gives more relevance to present time whereas Lefevbre focuses on the history of time). However, I think that the conflict between these two authors is the conception of nature. Undoubtedly they consider that nature is the ideal space that escapes from the constraints of the capitalist world. However, Lefebvre considers that nature is more an ideal than a reality. For Thrift, nature is always ready to be accessed. How can we conceive the idea of nature? Should we just look at it as an arbitrary construction (a social one) that we can live and experiment? Is nature a fixed territory where ideal connections are made? Does nature exist?

3) Finally, (yes, I have focused all my questions in Thrift’s article), I have been thinking of Paul Virilio’s concern about internet. For Virilio, Internet has the potential of being a general accident that might affect the whole world. By accident he talks about the loss of the public sphere (or the real life in the city, the democratic participation, the experience of being alive). I’m bringing Virilio’s concern to this question because (and I don’t know why) Thrift avoids talking about the internet in his non-representational theory. Once again, and I might sound repetitive, what type of space is the Internet? Which are the practices on internet that might give it a sense of space?

Definition (Still working with space):

Space:

Looked in isolation, space is nothing else but an empty abstraction. Therefore it is important to see space as a live organism that is spatially distributed (Thrift, 2007). In other words, space cannot be defined according to the proximity of the objects that surround a human body, but it must be understood as a web of relations and actions of different human experiences. Lefebvre (1991) corroborates this notion by pointing out that one of the characteristics of space is that it enables a set of relations between things (object and products).

Farman and Thrift Response

1. I was really struck by Dr. Farman’s discussion of Stone’s work on phone sex, which he opens up to include the (maybe?) more modern phenomenon of sexting. While I agree that phone sex, sexting, and even cybersex rely on the reconstitution of the body from verbal or textual cues (anyone remember the A/S/L? days of the Internet?), I wanted to think a little bit harder about the reconstitution of the body as both a visual, but also something that is present in or takes up space. Using text-only cybersex (meaning that which occurs without a visual or auditory element–no webcam, no microphone/speakers) as a starting point, I wonder how or if the reconstituted body takes up space. By virtue of asking the A[ge]/S[ex]/L[ocation]? question as well as questions about appearance (hair color, weight, etc.) those who engage in these interactions construct a visual image of their online sex partner. Does this image only exist in “mental space” or is it also projected (my brain keeps making this into a hologram for some reason) into the individual’s physical space?

2. Nigel Thrift argues that the mystical, specifically “New Age thinking [,] often stresses grids of power like ley lines, nature goddesses and the like, as well as the importance of particular sites as magical territories able to conjure up communication with the other” (66). While I agree that many spiritual and religious traditions depend on shifting space to place (a place of worship, a place of mystical convergence), I wanted to draw attention to a missed (or maybe even misplaced) connection that might have strengthened this argument had it been utilized. In Conquest, Andrea Smith argues that part of the problem with New Age appropriation of Native American religious and spiritual traditions is precisely the lack of connection with the land. This couples with the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral land to ensure that while religious freedom is extended to Native communities, it is an impossibility due precisely to the necessity of physical presence at a particular place. Having read Smith’s work as well as the work of other Native/Indigenous authors, I admittedly bristled at Thrift’s off-hand discussion of “Western” and “Eastern” practices, as well as the connection bordering on conflation of New Age practices with “Hopi Indian practices” (66).

3. As I read Thrift’s discussion of the “experience economy,” I found myself convinced of his argument that experience is being mediated through technology and also being bought and sold. I also found myself wondering “so what?” The “so what” had less to do with the global flows of goods and capital and more to do with the question of whether or not it was necessarily “good” or “bad” that experience can be mediated this way. Thrift writes “[s]o what we see is bare life laid bare and anatomized, and put together again as saleable, immersive experiences” (73). What seems more problematic to me is the “salable” part, rather than the “anatomized, and put together again” portion. It’s almost as if Thrift presupposes that people should not experience experiences this way, and should go ahead and climb the mountain or walk through the park. But for those who cannot, doesn’t this synthetic, produced set of “kinaesthetic experiences” offer at least some form of access to certain experiences?

Place: Physical, mental, emotional states which can be named and expressed by the conditions that give them meaning
Body: Simultaneously the physical medium through which we experience place but also the way we determine our identity based on the experience of place.

Weekly Posts: Farman and Thrift

1) Last week several of us commented on the connections being made in the readings about the relationship between movement and space, and from that assumptions about people with physical disabilities’ relation to space.  This week’s reading about embodiment and the  idea of the cognitive unconscious had me thinking about neuro-diversity, and autism, and the fact that the ability to block out particular sensory input and to move through the world is one that is not uniform for everyone and everybody.  As Grosz points out, (as quoted in Farman on page 18) the concept of “the body” is based on generalizations, and “always misses someone’s particular body.”  How might our idea of embodiment change when thinking about those bodies that get left out? And how might the idea of embodiment and perception change for someone for whom it is incredibly difficult to block out sensory input?  Farman writes, “Embodiment depends on the cognitive unconscious” and I know that we all have cognitive unconsciousness to some degree, or the world would be unlivable, but still I wonder how we might think about embodiment in terms of people with autism or spectrum sensory disorders, how do we talk about their experience of the world/senses/space?

2) While writing the first part of this prompt, I was playing pandora radio, and an advertisement for google maps came up, showing the viewer all the different tourist sites and natural landscapes.  Thinking about the two Thrift pieces about nature and driving, I wonder what happens when “nature” becomes what is inside the computer screen? How does the act of “walking” down a google street differ or not from the experience of actually walking down the street?  It is marketed by google as being the same as visiting those sites, and in many ways it is–you have the streets full of people and cars (or in the case of my hometown, empty of both, as is the norm).  In my intro to geology course in undergrad, we used google maps to visit volcanoes, and were able to explore them in ways that we never could in “real life.”  However, it is also obviously different, while connected to our own experiences of place.  What about the difference between the experience of visiting familiar places on google maps–and how we can immediately place ourselves there, full of memories of being in that actual space, compared to the experience of being on a street which we haven’t actually visited before, except on google maps, yet it still feels familiar because we have seen it, and moved on it through the computer screen? How is this linked to the idea of proprioception and embodiment?

3) I don’t know that I have a question attached to this observation, but I liked Thrift’s point about the development of understanding social interaction as body practices, as I think this is linked to, and contributes to the discussion we have had in class about the idea of social space and social communication/interaction between humans and possibly machines/molecules.  It also furthers our understanding of what bodies do, and to think about the act of perception as also being one about communication.

Definitions:

Space: relationship between bodies and objects; understood in relation to our embodied experience of the world, the meaning that we attach to the  areas that we move through–be they virtual or physical

Experience: linked to an idea of embodiment, and our perceptions of the world around us

The body: is located in space, and produced by space, and produces space. it is based on generalizations of certain groups of bodies and “always misses someone’s particular body.” (Grosz)

Weekly Post 2: The Production of Space

On page 19 of the Farman reading, it is stated that one can not imagine a body without space. I won’t dispute that. What I wonder, though, is if people can or do conceptualize themselves or others in digital communications as sensory without body. The emphasis on dislocation is noted in that same session, and it leads me to question if we have not reached the ultimate separation between body and space, one in which the component of the body – at least on the receiving end – is eliminated from the process. Particularly when it comes to exclusively online communications, can we conceptualize someone who we have never met as another body, or ourselves as one to them?

On pages 23 and 24 of Farman, the nature of bodies as being produced by culture is brought up. While virtual spaces are definitely places of culture, they often become places in which traditional cultural norms are opposed and clashes occur between the culture of the physical world and that of the virtual, to put it crudely. Is this virtual culture distinct, if not completely separated, from culture in the physical world, or is it possible that this plays into a Durkheimian notion of these virtual places becoming the anointed places where incremental social change is vented through and takes place in.

In reading about Thrift’s inspiration on the body, I have begun to wonder if the “gap” that Lefebvre claims philosophy has placed between the mind and the body is, in fact, bridged by culture. Thrift discusses the implications of a body that consists of both the biological and the cultural, and in my own studies I have been taught and have confirmed on its own merits that culture is a lens of sorts through which we view the world. Is it possible that it is this quality that allows the conscious mind to interpret and embody itself in the spaces – physical or otherwise – that it occupies?

Definitions:

Cartesian: In reading through Farman’s work and his discussion of dislocation, the notion of Cartesian thought is brought forth again. While I don’t think that the definition itself has changed, Farman provides an interesting example of the idea retaining popular appeal if not philosophically, then practically and subconsciously.

Body: The “body” can be defined in the most simple of senses as an individual’s physical form and any of its extensions (piercings, prosthetics, etc.). In a more complex manner, though, I believe it could be argued that the body it any means through which one embodies themselves in a world, and it is possible for a person to have one or more bodies based on the spaces in which they become embodied.

The Production of Space

1. Lefebvre gives as one of the implications of the creation of social space that “(physical) natural space is disappearing” (30). Does this mean that natural space is the raw material for the production of social space, and once altered can never cease to be social space? Also, in this conception of space, how do we account for the physical aspects of social space if they are excluded from what Lefebvre considers (physical) natural space?

2. The idea of mental space had always seemed to me to be a metaphorical concept, but Lefebvre regards mental space as as “real” as physical or social space. He indicates that social space can overlap either category, but I am still wondering how a mental space can be purely mental, when all the examples he gives are of a space created by the exchange of ideas, which is still a social function.

3. The concepts of mental and social space are obviously useful to understanding digital space, but can digital space be limited to these categories? Is digital space simply a non-physical social space, or does it necessitate a rethinking of Lefebvre’s categories?

Week 2 The Production of Space

Definitions:

a. Space: is freedom to move. It is always in direction relationship to place

b. Place: “calm centered of established values” which means that meaning is inscribed into space through experiences

Questions:

1. Tuan makes the claim in the introduction that she wants to detach the understandings of space from culture in order to posit a universal understanding of space (p.56). Can space be truly detached from culture if it derives its meaning from experience?

2. Tuan also discusses migration and overcrowding (60) in terms of push and pull factors. I am interested in seeing how space place operate in terms of conflicts amongst different migratory/ immigrant groups. For instance, post 195 migration saw a rise in the number of Latin American and Caribbean Americans arriving to the states, specifically major cities. It would be interesting to see how space and place operates across interracial and intrracial lines. What were the conflicts and resolutions between Black West Indian immigrants and African Americans in New York City?

3.  Kristen Simonsen’s text deals with the body in Lefebvre’s work. Simonsen argues that Lefebvre is arguing/ or implicating the body in his discussion of space. However, I am interested in the type of body? She is arguing for a feminist perspective but does this feminist perspective take into account the ways in which race, class, sexuality, and gender changes how our theoretical and physical understandings of the body?

The Production of Space

Definitions:

Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our bodily presence.

Place: those specific spaces to which we are affectively and physically attached, bound, or oriented toward.

Identity: our lived experience of being situated spatially and temporally; the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s).

Questions:

1. Throughout this week’s readings, I was particularly interested in Henri Lefebvre’s concept of representational space, which he describes as “linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life” (33) and which Kirsten Simonsen describes as “the lived space; the space of inhabitants and users as well as of some artists and writers, the space they incessantly seek to create through appropriation of the environment” (7), as well as the space of “conflicting rhythms of everyday life” (Simonsen 7). While politics are certainly implicated in each level or element of Lefebvre’s dialectical triad, I found the idea of representational space to be the most productive for thinking about social difference, one of the primary preoccupations of feminists, critical race theorists, scholars of (dis)ability, etc. The ways in which we live and experience space constitute or produce the meaning(s) of our differences. While Simonsen focuses on the aspects of Lefebvre’s work that can work generatively with feminism, she neglects other fields’ attention to difference; Tuan, moreover, seems downright dismissive of ways of experiencing space that do not correspond to what we traditionally think of as able-bodiedness, let alone to the rational humanist subject (Tuan 52, 65). My question, therefore, is how might engaging a variety of differences, from gender to racialization to ability to neurodiversity (none of these being easily separable, of course), enable us to come to a more nuanced and rigorous understanding of the production of space?
2. I found myself reading The Production of Space queerly; that is, I found many place/moments in the text where his theory of the production of space could be useful for theorizing queer lives. For example, Lefebvre argues that several things are necessary for a society to generate or appropriate a social space to achieve self-presentation or self-representation (34). One of these is that “the family (long very large, but never unlimited in size) be rejected as sole centre of focus of social practice, for such a state of affairs would entail the dissolution of society; but at the same time that it be retained and maintained as the ‘basis’ of personal and direct relationships which are bound to nature, to the earth, to procreation, and thus to reproduction” (34-35). This got me thinking about John D’Emilio’s essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in which he argues that capitalism gave rise to a proliferation of sexual identities by virtue of the fact that the family was no longer the most important unit of social (re)production. What are other ways Lefebvre’s work has been taken up queerly? What might queer productions of social space look like, either historically or in the future?
3. Finally, I was wondering about the operations of capitalism under neoliberalism while reading Lefebvre’s descriptions of state power in the latter half of the twentieth century. He argues that “The state is consolidating on a world scale. It weighs down on society (on all societies) in full force; it plans and organizes society ‘rationally’, with the help of knowledge and technology, imposing analogous, if not homologous, measures irrespective of political ideology, historical background, or the class origins of those in power” (23). How does state power look different under neoliberalism? Is space produced differently with intense privatization and the expansion of markets? Similar issues are raised with regard to Requiem for Detroit—what happens to a place when its relationships to the means of production and consumption drastically change?

Weekly Posts: Lefebvre, Tuan, Simonsen

1) Like Cassy, Tuan’s description of the constricted space of the “bedridden” and old gave me pause, and made me wonder what type of body is imagined to exist within these spaces.  What is assumed about the body and ability? What about mobility? Location?  Also, Tuan speaks of the importance of culture and experience, but argues that there are shared traits of the “general human condition.”  The questions that came to me while reading feel simplistic/obvious/un-sophisticated, but I kept thinking about the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, ability were unmarked in the discussions around people and the body, even as differences between cultures was marked through class, nationality, and distinctions between the West and the East.

2) Lefebvre while discussing time’s role in space, writes, “Let everyone look at the space around them. What do they see? Do they see time? They live time, after all; they are in time.  Yet all anyone sees is movements.”  This line caught my eye, and made me wonder more about the question of mobility and movement.  How is time and space (spacetime–as Kath Weston in “Gender in Real Time” writes about) related to movement? (Which makes me think of the race maps that we looked at and the way that what remains unseen by those maps is the way that people might be moving back and forth.) Also, has time become invisible the way Lefebvre argues, “concealed by space?” Or is it that we cannot separate the two?

3) I don’t know if I have particular reading to attach this to, and many people have already brought up the digital in their responses, but I am also curious about how thinking about the internet and the digital changes our idea of space.  How do hand-held devices act as mediating tools in the spaces that we exist in? How are our concepts of digital space changing as we move more and more in a world of not digital reality but augmented reality–the internet and digital ever at our fingertips? How do we think about space where there are no bodies present? What about the difference between digital spaces where we are operating in asynchronous time, versus digital spaces where we interact in real time? How do we name the lived experience of having online identities? And, I guess that also brings me to another question…how do personal identities link to experience and space? (I guess these are questions more directed at the class/semester as a whole rather than particular to the readings.)

Definitions:

Space: “basic component of the environment” (Tuan, 3), not imbued with meaning in the same way that place is.
“a set of relations between things (objects and products).” (Lefebvre, 83). something involving the movement of bodies and lived experienced.

Experience: that which allows us to understand space and place, subject and object.   Merleau-Ponty has a phenomenology of “lived experience, located in the space between mind and body, or subject and object–the intersubjective space of perception and body” (Simonsen).

Week Two: Lefebvre, Simonsen, and Tuan

“A tool or machine enlarges a person’s world when he feels it to be a direct extension of his corporeal powers,” asserts Tuan. He then identifies mechanical modes of transportation as such extensions (53). However, he also argues that, “conquest of space can mean its diminishment. The speed that gives freedom to man causes him to lose a sense of spaciousness (54). ” My question is, can online communication be seen as a mechanical mode of transportation (transcending time and geographical space via communication), enlarging the user’s world at the click of a button? And if so, how can it cause man to “loose a sense of spaciousness?”

According to Tuan, “Enclosed and humanized space is place. Compared to space, place is a calm center of established values,” and asserts that, “Human beings require both space and place. Human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom” (54). If we consider the online community as this space, within the shelter of our homes, providing a single point of departure with various points of arrival (blogs, social media, websites) would online space be considered “space” or “place,” or could it be characterized as both?

Kirsten Simonsen comments on Lefebvre’s need for “juxtaposition” with feminist literature when theorizing the body. I would also be interested to see an analysis of multiple representations of the body.

Definition:

 Space: is abstract and material. It is simultaneously generative naturally, socially and politically and it is regenerative. It is expansive, but can be restrictive. It is self-reflective, and can be violent, formulaic, and focused; it is also open, confined, free and profitable.