The Pigeon Feather Dérive - Part 2

This is part 2 of the blog which is an account of a dérive I did with Tim Waters on Saturday 22nd of September. Please click here for Part 1.

At one point on our walk the Dérive App told us to stand still for 3 minutes. Tim spotted some chalk graffiti on the wall and we checked it out. It appears to be a symbol from Harry Potter (hence the HP) and we thought it might be for the Harry Potter Society on campus.

While the leaves below look like they are covered in frost, they are actually from the grit bunkers on campus. The bunkers seemed to have two types of salt in: the orangey stuff that us used on urban roads, but also white salt.

The university is really well organised in terms of its recycling. This seems to be the area where it is stored. It is located under the little bridge that takes you to stage@leeds.

The School of Earth and Environment are creating a Wildflower Meadow on campus - off the beaten track a bit, to protect it, I guess. But there was this sign explaining the reasons behind it. I expect it is part of the same project as the bee hive shown in the last part of the blog. Here's a tiny bit of blurb on the overall project, which is also including bird and bat boxes on campus: A new route to biodiversity

This is the final image of the blog. This football was found in Chancellors Court. I looked up the postcode and it is the Woodhouse area of Leeds.

Other University of Leeds Campus Blogs:
Schizoanalysing the University Campus
Emotionally Mapping the Campus

The Pigeon Feather Dérive - Part 1

On Saturday 22nd of September Tim Waters and myself went on a University of Leeds campus dérive. We decided to use two different methodologies to create the chance route: an urban app (well, more a website) called, unsurprisingly, Dérive App, and also Oblique Strategies, a system used to help the flow of creativity. We used the two in conjunction with each other, for example, when one or the other didn't quite work, or to help us make a particular decision in regards to our route.

It was a nice sunny day, so the campus looked lovely. Here is one of the campus' three pyramids. This one is located at the back of the Student Union and if you climb up you can look down into a chamber, which is a room that I believe is no longer used.

These interesting pieces of rock have striation and bore holes on them, maybe made by geologist exploring the campus, or even discarded by the very same. Anyway, they now sit on the ground between the E C Stoner building and the Sports Hall.

We wandered around in the underpasses below the precinct area. It is part of the underground infrastructure of the campus, built in the 1960s. There was quite a lot of maintenance-related phenomena including much pipeage and quite a lot of dripping water that had formed stalactites and stalagmites in places.

Tim spotted a lovely beehive, semi-hidden between buildings, which we were surprised to see wasn't cordoned off in any overly security-conscious way. But, then, maybe the bees themselves were a good enough deterrent.

The 'couple' below allowed us to take a photo of them. The dérive app told us to look for a couple by showing us a picture of two individuals holding hands. We spotted this chap with his arms around his 'partner'. We thought they were a couple, so I asked them if we could take a photo and explained why, but they were actually brother and sister!

The Pigeon Feather Dérive - Part 2

Other Campus Dérives:
The Forgotten Solo
The Cherry Tree Dérive
The White Horseman Dérive

This is NOT my Summer!

Yesterday (Saturday September 15) I went to an excellent cartography workshop at the university campus called Campfire on Wild Cat Island: Workshop about literary maps, fictional geography and...holiday memories.

My own map, above, is a ribbon map. These types of map are new to me, but I like their linear form. I decided to create one on the three places I visited this summer: London, Leamington Spa and Hunstanton. They highlight the urban phenomenon I came across on my travels - anything from a Porsche to a boarded up Spar shop. They also contain a few animals: a squirrel, a cat and a Herring Gull. Some topiary. The London Eye and the Boston Stump. My map also contains two tiny maps. If you can spot them, let me know what places they represent and I'll tell you if they are correct!

I decided to name it This is NOT my Summer! because obviously it isn't - it's a map!

Links:
Emotionally Mapping the Campus
Maps of Competence
Cartography: Representation and Revealing the Hidden

Space/Place, Culture and Time (Part 2): Sigmund Freud

In part 1 of the blog I discussed Michel De Certeau's definition of the terms 'space' and 'place' from The Practice of Everyday Life, one of the main differences between the two being that place prohibits the superimposition of particular phenomenon, while space is able to cope with the contradictions of multiple and differing actors/actions, systems, agendas, etc.

Here I shall be providing an interesting spatial reference by Freud from Civilization and its Discontents which is offered as a kind of thought experiment for his readers in order to help explain how the ego operates on a developing sense of self in the individual. Freud explains that our initial sense of self - as a baby - is of an oceanic nature. It is connected to the vastness of the world, with no clearly defined subject/object boundaries. As we develop, the ego separates off from the outside world and becomes removed from this 'oneness'. However, Freud says, there is still a trace of this oceanic moment in our memory, as with those subsequent developmental phases that we seem to also forget on a conscious level (e.g. the Oedipal stages). This eloquent analogy by Freud, below, demonstrates that nothing is ever totally lost in internal space - the mind. But from the perspective of place and space, as it is for De Certeau, it offers up an example of external space, replete with its ambiguities, oppositions and negations - and how that space might be, if it weren't for place:

"Now let us make the fantastic assumption that Rome in not a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long, rich past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent. For Rome this would mean that on the Palatine hill the imperial palaces and the Septizonium of Septimus Severus still rose to their original height, that the castle of San Angelo still bore on its battlements the fine statues that adorned it until the Gothic siege. Moreover, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus wuld once more stand on the site of the Palazzo Caffarelli, withought there being any need to dismantle the latter structure, and indeed the temple would be seen not only in its later form, which is assumed during the imperial age, but also in its earliest, when it still had Etruscan elements and was decorated with terracotta antefixes. And where the Coliseo now stands we could admire the vanished Domus Aurea of Nero; on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the present Pantheon, bequeathed by Hadrian, but the original structure of M. Agrippa; indeed, occupying the same ground would be the church of Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it is built. And the observer would perhaps need only to shift his gaze or his position in order to see the one or the other.

It is clearly pointless to spin out this fantasy any further: the result would be unimaginable, indeed absurd. If we wish to represent a historical sequence in spatial terms, we can do so only by juxtaposition in space, for the same space cannot accommodate two different things. Our attempt to do otherwise seems like an idle game; its sole justification is to show how far we are from being able to illustrate the peculiarities of mental life by visual means."

Space/Place, Culture and Time (Part 1): Michel De Certeau

Space/Place, Culture and Time (Part 1): Michel De Certeau

The definitions of space and place are multifarious and vary not only between fields of theory (cultural geography, urban sociology, etc) but also between individual theorists within the same field. Below I have provided the example set out by Michel De Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. It may seem complex upon first reading it, but when you start to think about applying examples to what De Certeau describes, it becomes easier to understand. Part 2 of this blog will provide an interesting cultural example (architectural and psychoanalytical) of how the world might be if space and place were collapsed into each other.

"A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the 'proper' rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and distinct locations, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. On this view, in relations to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependant upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a 'proper'.

In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs."

Space/Place, Culture and Time (Part 2): Sigmund Freud

Lefebvre, Rationality and Zoning. Part 2: Space is the most general of tools

Part 1 of this blog covered the zoning used by urban planners to rationalise space, and the cultural effects produced by that in relation to 'difference'. I also made reference to the naturalising function of this on space itself and how Louis Althusser's ideological state apparatuses theory can be applied to our individual subjectification process in this regard. Here's that blog:

Lefebvre, Rationality and Zoning. Part 2: The analytical activity that discerns differences

This blog looks at what Henri Lefebvre means by "abstract space" and then includes a paragraph of his from The Production of Space that relates to the rationality and zoning theme of these two blogs, while demonstrating its actual effects on space (urban and otherwise).

While'abstract' appears to be quite an innocuous and bland word - while at the same time having many theoretical interpretations, not least Marxian ones, which bring with it a whole load of deconstructionist baggage - for Lefebvre it has a very specific and far from insipid meaning when he applies it to one of his forms of space.

Thetypes of space Lefebvre uses are: social, absolute, abstract, contradictory, differential, etc. They can co-exist. This blog is only concerned with abstract space. I find the best way to understand abstract space is by applying some of the tenets of neoliberlism (capitalism, etc) directly to space. Therefore, if you have a general understanding of capitalism in postmodernity in regards to how it functions - e.g. homogeneity, abstraction (in the Marxian sense), the co-existence of dichotomies such as absence/presence (in other words dualities) and, say, a focus on the visual (or, if you will, the spectacle) - then you will get it. Add a bit of Baudrillard's critique of the sign in Simulacra and Simulation and you've pretty much got it nailed.

So,for Lefebvre, abstract space is perfectly able to cope with contradictions in regards to representation. It is also duplicitous - well, in fact, it is duplicitous because of this. As Lefebvre states: "it is both a result and a container". One of the cleverest tricks it employs, as discussed in the last blog, is the fudging of the apparent temporal direction in regards to cause and effect. Some of the binary oppositions it happily co-presents with absolutely no negation at all are: positive/negative, empty/full, constraining/stimulating, distance/limit, local/global, benevolent/malevolent, etc, the list is endless...

So,now you understand a bit more what abstract space is for Lefevbre, this is the paragraph I promised. Here he explains the result of abstract spaces raison d'etre:

"...absraction's modus operandi is devastation, destruction (even if such destruction may sometimes herald creation). Signs have something lethal about them - not by virtue of 'latent' or so-called unconscious forces, but, on the contrary, by virtue of the forced introduction of abstraction into nature. The violence involved does not stem from some force intervening aside from rationality, outside or beyond it. Rather, it manifests itself from the moment any action introduces the rational into the real, from the outside, by means of tools which strike, slice and cut - and keep doing so until the purpose of their aggression is achieved. For space is instrumental - indeed it is the most general of tools." (page 289)


The following two blogs relating to the cutting up of space may also be of interest:

Cutting up Space Part 1: L = S - [l + c + i = e + p]
Looks at a formula used in how land value is calculated in the marketplace.

Cutting up Space Part 2: The Laws of Form
Introduces G Spencer Brown's calculus of indications in relation to demarcating space.

Bibliography:
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell).

Lefebvre, Rationality and Zoning. Part 1: The analytical activity that discerns differences

Tallahassee Land Use, USA

CC Wikimedia Commons

There's much written about the zoning used by local councils to manage and control space, which I'm not particularly going to go into here. But, being an urban aesthete I am intrigued by the control of space and the effects of that rationale on the individual. I'm also interested in how this is considered from a philosophical perspective. Here are some comments that Henri Lefebvre has made in The Production of Space on zoning. I'm going to provide a section of Lefebvre's text in full, then situate that within his discussion on "abstract space" in Part 2of this blog.

"Zoning...which is responsible - precisely - for fragmentation, break-up and separation under the umbrella of a bureaucratically decreed unity, is conflated with the rational capacity to discriminate. The assignment of functions, and the way functions are actually distributed 'on the ground', becomes indistinguishable from the kind of analytical activity that discerns differences. What is being covered up here is moral and political order: the specific power that organizes these conditions, with its specific socio-economic allegiance, seems to flow directly from the Logos - that is, from a 'consensual' embrace of the rational." (page 317)

One of the key things Lefebvre mentions here is the 'covering up' and being a psychogeographer, this is what I'm particularly interested in: what's behind the spectacle. The political decisions and administrative procedures that make space appear the way it does behind the representations, the signs, that end up manifesting themselves in space in a seemingly innocuous way, to such an extent that they appear 'natural'. Louis Althusser talks about this naturalising function in his Ideological State Apparatuses essay (which is one of my favourite texts and I'd recommend to anyone who is interested in how the individual is functionally situated as a citizen in society). Althusser explains that it is the raison d'etre of the various state apparatuses of which we partake/belong/sign-up to, that they "interpellate" us in such a way that we do not realise that we are being fixed, identified and recognised as such. But, what is crucial to Althusser, is that we don't realise this is happening to us. Althusser's clever example is of a policeman who hails someone in the street, but we turn around because we think he's hailed us (we recognise ourself in the call 'hey you there'), and in that bodily turn, and that recognition, we become interpellated by the system, by the apparatus. We take up our place as a citizen subject, this is 'natural'. In fact, and Althusser leaves this fantastic bombshell till later in the text, this happen before we are even born! (I won't explain this to you here, go read the text, it's well worth it).

Anyway, I only slightly, digress. This 'covering up' and 'naturalising' of space works in a similar way to that which I've explained by Althusser's interpellation. We situate ourselves in urban space as subjects by following its paths, accepting its rules and bylaws, and behaving like 'good' citizens. We don't question the ideological processes that take place behind it most of the time. And, even if we do on occasions complain about a 'monstrous' piece of architecture we might not like, or that new supermarket on the edge of town, on an everyday basis we are interpellated by the urban decor that controls our behaviour and that we obsequiously obey.

Moreover - and more importantly to Lefebvre here - the bureaucratic processes that hide under the veil of urban space, work in a reflexive way such that they both conceal and create the differences that are formed through the rationalising formulations actually used in, for example, zoning. We (society) creates differences, then comments on those differences like they came about all on their own. Historically they have appeared - spatially - in anything from workhouses to ghettos, with the actual forming of the differences being concealed under the 'natural order of things'.

Related posts:

Space as a Locus of Production
Louis Althusser, Ideology and the Practices of the Institution
The Power of Representation

Bibliography:

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell).