Preliminary Class Business

• Presentations
  
  
  • Today: Katherine Voll
    
  • Next class: Jeff Beckstrand
    
    
• Critiques due this Wed.

• Last week
  
  
• This week
  
  
• Next week
  1 | 2

Place

• W. Wordsworth, Poems on the Naming of Places,
  e.g., "To M. H."
  
  
• Ernest Hemingway, from "Big Two-Hearted River":
  
  

  Nick moved along through the shallow stretch watching the banks for deep holes. A beech tree grew close beside the river, so that the branches hung down into the water. The stream went back in under the leaves. There were always trout in a place like that. Nick did not care about fishing that hole. He was sure he would get hooked in the branches. It looked deep though. . . . Nick waded over to the hollow log. He took the sack off, over his head, the trout flopping as it came out of water, and hung it so the trout were deep in the water. Then he pulled himself up on the log and sat, the water from his trouser and boots running down into the stream. He laid his rod down, moved along to the shady end of the log and took the sandwiches out of his pocket. He dipped the sandwiches in the cold water. The current carried away the crumbs. He ate the sandwiches and dipped his hat full of water to drink, the water running out through his hat just ahead of his drinking. It was cool in the shade, sitting on the log. He took a cigarette out and struck a match to light it. The match sunk into the gray wood, making a tiny furrow. Nick leaned over the side of the log, found a hard place and lit the match. He sat smoking and watching the river.

  
  
• Robert Smithson
  • "Spiral Jetty" (1972)
  • "A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites" (1968) | A Non-Site, Pine Barrens, NJ (winter 1968) 1, 2
    
    
• Richard Long
  
  
• Andy Goldsworthy
  
  
  

  ---

  
  
• Albert Borgmann, from Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (1999)
  
  

  The ancestral environment was profoundly coherent because of the regular interplay of signs and things. When a band of the Salish, some two hundred or two thousand years ago, moved from its summer camp in the Missoula valley north to a winter camp by the "Stream of the Little Bull Trout," now called Rattlesnake Creek, the distant narrows where the creek turns east must have been the first sign they followed. Once they had reached that area, a western tributary to Rattlesnake Creek would alert them that they were within a few hundred feet of the campsite. Finally cairns, tipi rings, or remnants of brush and hide shelters marked the place where they would winter, protected from the punishing east winds and just a few hundred feet below the level to which game retreats from the snow.          Natural signs disclose the more distant environment, yet they do not get in the way of things. A natural sign, having served as a point of reference, turns back into a thing, . . . naturally and quietly. Thus the ancestral environment, however and wherever humans moved in it, maintained a focal area of presence with a penumbra of signs referring to the wider world.          The ancestral environment of the Salish was well-ordered as well as coherent because some natural signs stood out as landmarks from among the inconspicuous and transitory signs of creeks, rocks, trees, and tracks. Landmarks were focal points of an encompassing order. (p. 25)

  
  
  
• Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936)
  
  

  Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. (¶ II)         We define the aura of the latter [natural objects] as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. (¶ III)

  
  
  
• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1986):
  
  

  As the space between the points—the traditional traveling space—was destroyed, those points moved into each other's immediate vicinity: one might say that they collided. They lost their old sense of local identity, formerly determined by the spaces between them. (p. 38)          The regions, joined to each other and to the metropolis by the railways, and the goods that are torn out of their local relation by modern transportation, shared the fate of losing their inherited place, their traditional spatial-temporal presence or, as Walter Benjamin sums it up in one word, their "aura." (p. 41)

  
  
  
• Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995) [orig. pub. in French, 1992] (book cover)
  
  

  If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places. . . . A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object. . . . (pp. 77-78)

  
  
• Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991) (images of postmodern spaces)

Technology/Media

• Wolfgang Schivelbusch
  
  

  The empirical reality that made the landscape seen from the train window appear to be "another world" was the railroad itself, with its excavations, tunnels, etc. Yet the railroad was merely an expression of the rail's technological requirements, and the rail itself was a constituent part of the machine ensemble that interjected itself between the traveler and the landscape. The traveler perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machine ensemble. (p. 24)         Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him through the world. (p. 64)

  
  
• Eadward Muybridge
  
• Sue Thomas, Hello World: Travels in Virtuality (2004)
  
  

  [On LambdaMOO:] Some people try to make a map, but the complexity of the place always defeats them. Some even make models out of wood or plastic or clay, but this is going in the wrong direction—it's impossible to physically capture the multi-dimensional nature of virtuality. (p. 26)

  
  
• Walter Benjamin
  
  

  During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. (¶ III)         Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question—whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art—was not raised. (¶ VII)

  
  
• Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message," in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1994) [orig. pub. 1964]
  
  

  In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

Muybridge
(cf., Ansel Adams)

Baudrillard:
cover | p. vii | p. x

Sue Thomas: cover | her lambdaMOO place ("connect guest" to log on, then "@go #14691")

Other Resources for This Class

• Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989)
  
  
• John Clare's poetry