Space%20is%20the%20place

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Space is the place

• Hum 201
• Autumn 2005
• Day 5

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Todays itinerary

• Use de Certeau to make place and space
  strange.
• Demonstrate how this is related to embodiment and
  perception
• Begin to think about the uses of narratives,
  tours, and maps

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• What does it mean to travel?

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Space and place-common sense

• Space is the territory, often defined as the
  distance between
• Rene Descartes
• Place is a specific place in that territory.
• One place rather than another
• Extension is a primary quality of matter
• Space is quantity of extension
• Most of us still think of space as either
  extension or emptiness
• What about cyberspace?

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Michel de Certeau

• 1925-1986
• The Practice of Everyday Life
• French, 1968
• Translated into English 1984
• Are we passive consumers?
• Not if we examine ways of operating
• Often involves seeing how mediums and objects are
  used
• Involved in a hidden poiesis

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Traveler as producer

• Traveler
• The terrain is fixed
• Paris is Paris, a path through the woods is still
  through the woods
• Do we change the terrain when we travel?
• The traveler produces meaning through the
  practices that they engage in as they traverse
  the terrain
• Think in terms of how we use objects to create
  meaning and direction in our life

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Place in de Certeau

• Place is an order
• A configuring of positions
• Something is in one place and not another
• Implies a stability or fixity of relationships
• Everything is in its place

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Space in de Certeau

• Intersections of mobile elements
• Space is produced as an effect of the operations
  that orient it and temporalize it
• Space is practiced place
• The street is transformed into space by the
  walkers on it

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Space and depth

• Space is not extension!
• Space is how things are connected and the depth
  of connections that allows them to present
  themselves
• Space is practiced and embodied

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Building on Merleau-Ponty

• space is not the setting (real or logical) in
  which things are arranged, but the means whereby
  the position of things becomes possible.
  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
• The opacity of the body in movement,
  gesticulating, walking, taking its pleasure, is
  what indefinitely organizes a here in relation to
  an abroad (de Certeau, 110)

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Tours and maps

• Maps are of places
• Tours are of spaces
• Maps have disengaged themselves from specific
  itineraries
• No longer embodied
• Work against the strangeness of travel by
  orienting places

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• Nova orbis tabula. De Wit 1688
• http//www.maphistory.info

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Stories and travel

• Stories transform spaces into places
• Is this purely metaphorical?
• Place as contingent and continually needing
  redefining
• Stories change our connections to the world
• They redefine a relationship between the self and
  the world

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Whats next?

• Still packing our bags
• Move from objects, perceptions, bodies, space
• Come to a humanistic definition of consciousness
  that is embodied, spatial, and dynamic
• After that we begin the journey
• Or has it started?