Space is the place

Hum 201Autumn 2005

Day 5

Today’s 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

• What does it mean to travel?

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?

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”

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

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

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

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

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)

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

Nova orbis tabula. De Wit 1688

http://www.maphistory.info

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

What’s 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?