Lefebvre, Simonsen, Tuan: Questions/Connections
1.) While I found the excerpts from Tuan’s Space and Place helpful in beginning to craft a language with which to discuss space and place (I hope my 101 students appreciate it), I wanted to take this opportunity to push against his assertions about space, mobility, and the experience or feeling of freedom. Tuan writes “An infant is unfree, and so are prisoners, and the bedridden. They cannot, or have lost their ability to, move freely” (52). In keeping with the theme of the body and embodiment, I question this assertion. Does, for example, being bedridden (or, perhaps a different term should be used here, one without the connotation of being “stuck” or “trapped”) really prevent one from accessing space? Can space be accessed remotely? Does space necessitate a mobile body, or are there other ways in which space may be conceptualized that do not require this physical requirement?
2.) Not to harp on Tuan here, but I’m going try to make a potentially awkward connection between Tuan’s discussion of crowding and Lefebvre’s discussion of things and commodities. We might get back around to space and place. In “Spaciousness and Crowding,” Tuan explains that things have the ability to produce feelings of crowdedness, but only when “people endow them with animate or human characteristics” (59). Lefebvre argues that “[t]hings lie, and when, having become commodities, they lie in order to conceal their origin, namely social labour, they tend to set themselves up as absolutes” (81). Perhaps a holdover from a different class, I’m interested here in the how and what of things’ concealment and deception that produces this affective expansion into space. That is, what are the mechanisms by which things’ hidden attributes take up space? Are they solely affective (the dead parent’s recipe book) or are they also part of the process of production and the “circuits they establish (in space)” (Lefebvre 81)?
3.) This might tie in too closely with my first question, but is there any way we can not “presuppos[e] the use of the body” in “social/spatial practice” (Simonsen 7)? Or, alternately, what “body” is presupposed here?
Definitions
Body: The corporeal aspect of the Self; cannot be separated from other “parts” of the Self, but rather functions as the physical means of interaction and experience with the world (Oh wow, this is messy)
Place: A space, which is imbued with “identity,” “aura,” and that can be named as itself via the invocation of some aspect of its identity (ex. “The place where we met,” “the place where the trees don’t grow”)