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Technology, Modernity and the Restructuring of the Present in Historical Geographies
Abstract
The following essay attempts to illuminate the production of “presences” in the course of European modernity. It argues that the disintegration of a stable and local presence is one of the defining, albeit largely ignored, characteristics of modernity. The consequences of what could rightly be called an “exploded” presence are then examined with the help of particularly illustrative innovations which originated within European modernity: paper money, iron and glass architecture and photography. In conclusion, the essays attempts an outline for a new geography of technology.
This essay analyses a key motif in geographical scholarship: the most basic form of mobility achieved by an abled-bodied person engaging in acts of walking. By embedding “walking” firmly within a phenomenological tradition, the essay places “being mobile” qua walking within a field of enquiry that conceptualises an embodied form of mobility as both enabling and limiting. Building furthermore from a growing body of literature that has differentiated between “walking” as an active form of engagement and a host of different geographically relevant modes of being, the paper adds a specifically epistemological set of considerations in an attempt critically to contribute to existing literatures and to interrogate the embodied practice of walking. Key in this endeavour is the contribution mobile modes of existence make to the construction of knowledge about the social world. The paper concludes with a prolegomena that recasts walking in the form of a geographically informed pedagogical practice.
O debate acerca das teorias não-representacionais, que desde o final dos anos 1990 é muito presente na geografia anglófona, é incipiente na geografia brasileira. Resgatou consigo a discussão sobre o espaço relativo, alicerçando seu arcabouço no conceito de afeto, que é, por sua vez, diretamente ligado às associações heterogêneas entre atores humanos e actantes não-humanos dispostos em redes. Os deslocamentos dos atores pelo espaço auxiliam a dinamizar as múltiplas percepções do espaço, ao submeter o ente que desloca à experiência do movimento. As distorções espaciais provocadas pelas relações em redes são capazes de alongar ou dobrar o espaço, além de comprimir ou dilatar o tempo. Partindo do pressuposto de que o ser é indissociável ao espaço percebido, o artigo em questão, essencialmente epistemológico, defende a premissa de que as distorções relativas do espaço são distorções da própria identidade. Este processo rejeita uma relação clara de causa e consequência entre espaço e identidade, apontando para um processo dialético e retroalimentado, que ressoa o afeto das associações heterogêneas, bem como contribui para o afeto de outrem.
Heritage tourism has flourished in the last three decades. Its importance has prompted the emergence of different kinds of analysis that have consolidated the heritage tourism as a topic in the academic debate. The present paper shows an anomalous case of heritage tourism: the 'ex haciendas' in the Xalapa area. The discussion of this case allows us to rethink and reopen the implicit assumptions of this topic. In doing so, we can present alternative ways as the old 'haciendas' are being visited and experienced as tourist sites.
Heritage tourism has flourished in the last three decades. Its importance has prompted the emergence of different kinds of analysis that have consolidated the heritage tourism as a topic in the academic debate. The present paper shows an anomalous case of heritage tourism: the 'ex haciendas' in the Xalapa area. The discussion of this case allows us to rethink and reopen the implicit assumptions of this topic. In doing so, we can present alternative ways as the old 'haciendas' are being visited and experienced as tourist sites.
The transformative powers of global capitalism presently dispossess and unsettle millions of people as well as comprehensively reshape the built environment on previously unseen scales of creative destruction. When the world is constantly dis(re)membered in ever new ways remembrance as a both individual and trans-generational complex of experience, memory, and knowledge loses significance in everyday life. Confronting rapidly transforming neo-liberal landscapes across the globe, critical scholars no less than dispossessed migrants find themselves in a memory crisis akin to the one observed as part of the context of the French Revolution and the profound transformations of European modernization. In the article, this collective crisis of memory-knowledge-politics is addressed through an engagement with the four concepts "reification,'' "amnesia,'' "aphasia,'' and "apraxia,'' the former elaborated through the latter three. Time-space disjunction and dislocation, irrelevance of memory, incapacity to combine, and inability to practice, equates passivity and obedience in relation to the havoc wrought upon masses of people and places. A core concern of the article is to articulate the four concepts in relation to built space and its role not simply as reflection of but rather as effecting and exacerbating the memory-knowledge-politics crisis. The article suggests that the memory crisis has political urgency in the particular sense that a radical politics against rei. cation needs to be articulated in relation to an understanding of built spaces as collective mnemonic assemblages of memory-knowledge-politics, while also suggesting that spaces might be mobilized to topologically articulate past and present intersectional relations of forgetfulness-ignorance-power, and thus possibly be made to contribute to rather than deflect political consciousness and continued struggles for democracy.
Transcending the dualism between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ has been one of the central aims of geographical knowledge during the last decade or so. The present paper adds to this growing body of literature by focusing on the construction of a key space of the French Second Empire (1852-1870), the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in the newly created 19th arrondissement in Paris. The paper argues that the nexus between culture and nature-what has been described most fittingly as ‘social nature’ in the literature-can profitably be approached through the lenses afforded by a reformulated concept of labour. Taking cues from Don Mitchell’s conceptual notion of ‘dead labour’, the paper explores the impact of both technology and design on an emerging urban nature that was to be centrally implicated in the naturalization of many values within an emerging bourgeois, Western world with its emphasis on the commodification of increasing parts of everyday life. Ostensibly non-commodified urban park landscapes were implicated in this process precisely because they embodied a notion of ‘labour’ that was-and continues to be-both necessary and homogeneous and thus akin to the sense of labour developing in the world of commerce at the same time.
In this essay I analyse the role of space in key texts belonging to the tradition of phenomenology. Starting from the assumption that phenomenology is uniquely positioned to answer the epistemological challenges posed by today's theoretical discourses, works by Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer are examined in light of their respective treatments of space. I assert that much of what passes as phenomenological knowledge is constructed around an unfounded idealisation of the written text and the spatial stability it embodies. In the subsequent development of a spatially open alternative I draw on Heidegger's elaboration of the 'event' and attempt to place such thinking within contemporary debates in the human sciences.
This paper examines the utopian scheme for Paris put forward by Fourierist engineer Perreymond in the Revue Générale de l'Architecture et des Travaux Publics (1840–1890). The plan is placed in the context of both nineteenth-century utopian conceptions of society, as well as the wider discussions of the urban fabric of Paris. Particular attention is paid to Perreymond's ideals and their influence as a specific moment in planning. This is followed by an examination of why this plan was destined to remain on paper whilst a similar scheme – that of Baron Haussmann – became concrete ten years later.
The purpose of this book is to situate geography as a discipline and a discourse within the fabric of contemporary social theory. Its focus is on understanding the ways in which social life is variously embedded in place, space and landscape. Historical imagination, textual exegesis, philosophical scrutiny, sociological interpretation are interwoven to progress spatial discourse to new levels. In mapping human geography into contemporary social theory, the author addresses, reinterprets and questions key theoretical debates and issues such as postcolonialism, structuration theory, feminism, deconstruction, postmodernism, and poststructuralism and explores the connection between space, power and knowledge. The book is a critique of contemporary social theory and provides a fundamental contribution to the understanding of social life and its intrinsic spatiality. -from Publisher
We all practice it, use its presumed power of explanation, and never seem to get tired of it: theory, only recently introduced to geography at large, appears to be indispensable for any truly rigorous analysis of the social world. But is it really? In this paper it is argued that even the most sophisticated of attempts at 'theorizing the social' can claim success only by abandoning reason where reason is needed most: in the abstract formulation of particularity. In the pursuit of this ultimately fatal flaw of any theoretical endeavour, the author ultimately asks what it is about society and space that seems to require a theoretical approach, and what precisely we stand to lose if we opt for a theoretically informed abandonment of theory. With reference to Walter Benjamin, whose work is read as an embodiment of the most crucial conflict between reason and justification, an attempt will be made towards a genuinely material social science that does not rely on external guarantees to achieve a modest goal in the possibility of cognizance.
This article presents an overview of Martin Heidegger's philosophical thinking in regard to technology. Heidegger is a key twentieth century thinker whose work can be compared and contrasted to the more well known thinkers and their insights in regard to modernity. Using Heidegger as a springboard, and locating him in the historical context of modernistic thinkers (which include Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Hobbes) this article provides a definition of modernity that coheres to historical and present day conceptions; and treats Heidegger's critique of modernity, technology, and metaphysics as a key to understanding conceptions of postmodern political and social life.
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