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).