Spatial Stories and Simulacra
Definitions:
Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our embodied social practices or relationships with other bodies (including objects).
Place: those specific spaces or locations to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects), through embodied practices of power (biopolitics), and through practices of representation, visualization, and mapping; those spaces or locations that gain meaning through technologies of surveillance.
Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools, technologies, and virtualities; the disciplining of self through technologies of surveillance; and the imagination or narrativization of self in relation to virtual and actual others or communities.
Questions:
1. This may seem tangential, but this week (like most weeks) I’m particularly drawn to the imaginary or imaginings of spaces and places. Perhaps this is because two of my favorite storytellers, Borges and Calvino, figure as a point of departure in many of our recent readings on virtuality, actuality, and reality. I’m fascinated by de Certeau’s argument that stories are spatial practices that perform the labor of transforming space and place (118), allowing us to conceptually “travel” between them. De Certeau leaves room for the work that desire does in constructing space and place; thus the virtual or potential can never be separate from the ways we live space because our desires, fulfilled or even barely imagined, will always form an integral part of our experience. I want to know how forms of critical desire (and maybe its inverse, refusal) might be mobilized in articulating spatial politics? This seems intimately bound to the utopian and dystopian concerns that weave throughout our course and, I would argue, all of our research projects.
2. Memory and metaphor are also key here as they shape the futures and the pasts we can imagine, as well as how we communicate or share our lived experiences of space, place, and identity. As de Certeau points out, metaphor or “metaphorai” is bound up with travel, one of the main ways we are able to think about our bodily experiences and practices of shifting spacetimes. I am especially attuned to this because my book review for today, Rowan Wilken’s Teletechnologies, Place, and Community, dealt explicitly with the use of images like “cyberspace” and “virtual community” to describe online presence and social interaction. What is at stake when the metaphors we use to describe things we otherwise might not have names for, like the slippery concept of “community”, rely on a subsumed or suppressed notion of space and place? What do we risk when we do not adequately attend to space and place but instead rely on it in primarily abstract or linguistic terms (thinking Lefebvre’s critique here)? To quote Martha Nell Smith, “mind your metaphors,” or to paraphrase Donna Haraway, it matters what stories we use to tell other stories with.
3. Imaginaries and socio-spatial fantasies also form part of the basis of Baudrillard’s argument. He argues that Disneyland “is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere–that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.” How might we revitalize a political imagination that does not just create a negative illusion of ourselves, or that is not merely a lie we tell ourselves? Can that which is imaginary be dissociated from the childish or fantastical? The world of the child or of fantasy is not “real,” yet it is clear that the imagined makes reality.