Flirting with Space

Journeys and Creativity

David Crouch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317134763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The idea of 'flirting' with space is central to this book. Space is conceptualised as being in constant flux as we make our way through various contexts in our daily lives, and is considered in relation to encounters with complexities and flows of material culture. This book focuses on journeys, which are perceived as dynamic processes of contemporary life and its spaces, and how creativity happens in the inter-relations of space and journeys encourage creativity. Unravelled through a range of empirical case studies of journeys through and encountered with space, this book builds new critical syntheses of the intertwining of space and life. Based on investigations undertaken by the author over the past 20 years, it explores the mundane and the exotic, the 'lay' and the 'artistic', combining and inter-relating them in a diversity of time and expression, fleeting and surviving. Such investigations, using both visual and non-visual material, include examinations of allotment holding, the work of artists, caravanning and tourism, photography and parish maps. The analyses of such seemingly disparate subjects are linked together and build on each other to create a fascinating and original view of humanity's interaction with space. Included are fresh discussions of belonging, disorientation and the working of identity and play. The notion of 'gentle politics' is introduced.

Chapter 1
Flirting with Space

Space; Flirting

In a way, much academic debate has been flirting with space for some time. A post-contextual debate has opened up in cultural studies particularly through Grossberg’s interventions that draws space into a relational role in the perpetual figuring and refiguring of culture, identity, power and politics that re-grounds cultural studies out of what he reasons to be a trap of dualities such as state and agency, lives and representations (Grossberg 2000, Wiley 2005). Numerous energies are rendered articulations in a one-dimensional ontology, without hierarchy or deference to particular kinds of context. All energies become multiply engaged in a popular culture and working of social practices of everyday life and their affects. Space, or place, is loosened from a heavy contextualization in prefigured culture and put into a more complex dynamic as ‘an articulation of bodies, materials, discourses and affects; a process that can occur in a wide range of scales and scopes’ (Wiley 2005: 66). This generative character of space is set in relation with ‘the ongoing spatial production of the real’ (Grossberg 2000). Agency is the chaos or multiplicity in things and this offers a realignment of subjectivity and power, change and resistance.

Space is similarly a participatory and dynamic energy in Massey’s geography: ‘the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing. This is place as open and internally multiple … not intrinsically coherent’ (Massey 2005: 141). Space is more that the contextual co-ordinates of the social, economic and political; more than the materials and their physical and metaphorical assemblage, of building material, vegetation, rock and so on. Space is increasingly recognized to be always contingently related in flows, energies and the liveliness of things; therefore always ‘in construction’, rather than fixed and certain, let alone static (Massey 2005). What space ‘is’ and how it occurs is crucially rendered unstable and shifting; matter and relations in process. It may be felt to be constant, consistent and uninterrupted, but that feeling is subjective and contingent.

The energy and vitality of space is articulated in the work of Deleuze and Guattari that has helped unravel and unwind familiar philosophies of the vitality of things; the multiplicities of influences and the way they work; and in a world of much more than the result of human construction. They offer a means to rethink the dynamics of space. Subjectivity is not erased but displaced, unsettled. Subjectivity works amongst the intensive capacity to affect and to be affected (Deleuze and Guattari 2004). Their term spacing introduces a fresh way of conceptualizing the process-dynamics of the unstable relationality of space/life. Spacing occurs in the gaps of energies amongst and between things; in their commingling. Their interest thus emerges ‘in the middle’, the in-between (ibid.).

Space becomes highly contingent, emergent in the cracks of everyday life, affected by and affecting energies both human and beyond human limits. Any privileging of human subjectivity in relation to anything else is disrupted. Spacing has the potential, or in their language potentiality, to be constantly open to change; becoming, rather than settled (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, Doel 1999, Buchanan 2005). In these respects there is resonance with Massey’s conceptualization of space as always in construction and relational. New encounters, however seemingly familiar, have the potential to open up new relations.

Deleuze and Guattari sought to make a distinction of emergent space in terms of an apparent duality of the energies of power in their constitution. Thus striated (institutional, capitalist) and smooth space that is a kind of freespace (Deleuze and Guattari 2004). These kinds of space suggest one way of thinking through the process of space in a way that operates in relation to what humans do, as different collectivities as well as individuals. Often their distinction appears as duality, yet: ‘The two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, traversed into striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to smooth space’ (Deleuze and Guattari op cit.). Neither space is sealed from the other; capitalist space is not a holistic drive. In this way enacting the relational character of space, affect and power, this commingling of the energies of spacing connects the case for better acknowledging the work of gentle politics that in a way works in the smooth space but unavoidably in relation to more institutionalized space. In a world that is multiple and relationally affective rather than hierarchical all kinds of life and things affect and are affected by space and commingle in their affects. Their multiple energies work in multiple ways with multiple affects, extending Casey’s writing of the co-constitutive character of life and space (Casey 1993).

Space and place become problematic relational categories or processes between these writings. Is Deleuze’s smooth space place, striated space place? The distinctions familiarly offered between space and place as ideas can get in the way of relating the multiple affects, energies and continual adjustments and relationalities of space in the wider grasp that Deleuze and others have articulated. The American geographer Tuan positions ‘place’ as

the centre of meaning constructed by experience, not only through the eyes and mind but also through the more passive and direct modes of experience, which resist objectification … At one end of the spectrum, places are points in a spatial system, at the other end of the spectrum places form a nexus of strong visceral feelings … which presuppose rootedness in the locality and emotional commitment to it that are increasingly rare. (Tuan 1975: 152)

In contrast, Grossberg and Massey bring ‘place’ into relation with space as the human experience and feel of space but also as a contingent grasp of the flows surrounding its dynamic relationality (2000, 2005). Yet de Certeau inverts these terms and their constituent processes: ‘… space is a practised place … the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers … i.e. place constituted by a system of signs’ (de Certeau 1984: 118).

Whilst acknowledging the complexity of place Tuan presents the idea of place as profoundly ‘situated’ in his appeal to ‘roots’ and continuity, resisting its contingency in the flows of energy, affects and flows. This general fixity of place comes to mirror a notion of steady continuity of identity and feeling. In contrast Deleuze and Guattari exemplify the fluidity of things through the metaphor of rhizome rather than roots. Rhizomes grow along or just below the ground surface; ever branching and going beyond, going further, than a situated position exemplified in what a root does (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 12 et seq).

These work as fleshy lines of energy and anastomosing ramifications that offer the loose meshing of directions and connectivity. Yet botanically rhizomes tend also to have roots situated at many different points in their lateral multidimensional growth. The significance of this everyday botany is that there can be multiplicity, multidirectionality in life as exemplified by a rhizome’s growth, and also of some relational and partial anchoring in particular points in the ‘ground’: A desire to open a little to the dynamic character of living, there is another desire to feel life held together; feelings in ways that defy duality, and mix. Especially in Chapter 3 I examine the significance of this complexity in terms of Grosz’s articulation of ‘holding on’ and ‘going further’ in living (Grosz 1999). In Chapter 4 the significance of the relational character of mobility, i.e. energies in multiplicity (not mobility as trains and planes), and of the variation of multi-local identities is taken up.

Reading Deleuze and Guattaari helps lift away from a human-centric grasp of the world that tended to occur in phenomenlogy, forcing our thinking towards much life that is not-human, wider materiality (things we can touch, see, feel) and other diverse energies and affects that flow in the making of space. The usefulness of this more open acknowledgement is exemplified in Deleuze’s interest in the very English author Virginia Woolf. In her book The Waves, Woolf evokes space of a train:

we are only bodies jogging along side by side. I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs … I am like a dog slipping smoothly over some waterfall. I am not a judge. I am not called upon to give opinion. Houses and trees are all the same in the grey light. Is that a post? Is that a woman walking? Here is the station, and if the train were to cut me in two, I should come together on the further side, being one, being indivisible. (Woolf 1931, 1998: 196)

Woolf is writing in space and of space; writing space. She opens multiple vibrations in connectedness beyond her own body and unravels her self, mind/body, whole in parts, the world resonating in awkward ways, uncertainly in flows, a notion perfectly and elegantly captured and activated in her book’s title The Waves. She narrates, in a stream of written consciousness-thought-feeling-unfeeling, the possibility of unthinking about self. In her uncertain resonance she exists relationally with and as space, life/space (hers, others’). She is jogged along as she sits in the train. It is as though she does not exist in this moment as an entity and is aware of everything in a detached manner, open only to the energies around her, beyond control and even of any reflexive sorting of the occurrence, a kind of disorientation. For Deleuze and Guattari The Waves exemplifies writing becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 324). Where she writes memory, he argues she writes becoming. Memory, heritage and becoming are constantly enfolded, if erratically, in our living (Crouch 2010b).

In this expression of space and energies she writes woman (Colebrook 2002: 155–157). Her writings neither express nor represent an already given female identity but of being/becoming woman, and identity as a flow of speech (Colebrook 2002: 2). This is more than the socially constructed body, gendered, ethnically framed and so on. Iris Marion Young recounts an observation of her daughter’s discovering throwing a ball in a way loosened from a particular gendered frame. Whilst not replacing these contextual affects, other ways are discovered than how we are socially constructed, in the doing and feeling (Young 1991: 11). Contexts flicker and inflect; they do not determine.

As Woolf writes only of detachment so Thrift’s writing frequently writes of the urgent necessity only of rapidity, the fleeting character and high-pressured intensity of flows, energies and affects; almost fevered connections and more so, disconnections and disorientation (Thrift 2004). Amongst other commentators this emphasis or insistence pursues a movement away from continuity and steadiness, and their associated subject-centred control and determination. Yet these urgencies deserve closer reference to complexities of living, interloping amongst other energies through which change, creativity, and the felt need to negotiate life as well as the significance of creativity amongst continuity and slowness that may be of no less power and significance, as Chapter 4 pursues. Spacing happens in a wide unlimited range of temporal and affective conditions, or situations.

Lefebvre positioned space as a number of relations between objects, combined in his triad of spaces: representation, design and the importance of the involvement of the individual, developed in his introductory approach to rhythm in the practice of space to suggest its relation from the point of view of the individual in action (Levebvre 1991/1974, 2004). His work and the enquiry of phenomenology offers ground for further critical interpretation of space and life around Deleuzian approaches, as does an alert and creative handling of social constructivism rather than their constitutive mutual exclusion. These informing threads contribute to how we may compile the everyday making of cultural and geographical practical ontology or lay knowledge through everyday practices (Shotter 1993). Space is an encounter in which individuals are involved (Crouch 2001). The philosopher Michael Foucault ‘worked with a philosophy of relation rather than object, to unravel complex relations that can be appropriated to life with a different generosity’ (Raffestin 2007: 30). In the essays of this book the emphasis is on working from the dimensions of mainly human life and its complexity of energies, offering a way to rethink the relational workings of space through everyday life amongst multiple flows.

Whilst constructivist practices focus upon the psychological and cultural-political, Burkitt has developed this approach through attention to the body as sensory as well as social work (1999). Inflected in a multi-sensual process of subjectivity sight no longer holds a privileged position and, as Ann Game’s sociology argues, everyday semiotics as visual sign-reading is engaged within a wider practice and process of material semiotics, or embodied semiotics (Game 1991, Crouch 2001). Despite its perceptual sophistication, the eye alone cannot necessarily go beyond a description of surface: ‘… sight says too many things at the same time. Being does not see itself. Perhaps it listens to itself’ (Bachelard 1994: 215).

The thinking-perceiving body moves out to its outer most edge where it meets another body (materiality, force, energy) and draws it into an interaction into the course of which it locks onto that body’s affects (capacities for acting and being acted upon) and translates them into a form that is functional for it (qualities it can recall). A set of affects, a portion of the object’s essential dynamism, is drawn in, transferred into the substance of the thinking-perceiving body. From there it enters new circuits of causality. (Massumi 1993: 36)

This offers a kind of working of meaning. Taussig writes that the eye makes its feeling way around space, profoundly tactile in its commingling of the senses (1992). Sight is felt, but in a mingling of senses, feeling and thought. Carrie Noland observes that gesture ‘cannot be reduced to a purely semiotic (meaning-making) activity but realizes instead – both temporally and spatially – a cathexis deprived of semantic content … gesture can … simultaneously convey an energy charge’ (Ness and Noland 2008: xiv). For Casey, meaning is framed in a kind of expectation (Casey 2005); and place is best understood as experimental living within a changing culture (Casey 1993).

Phenomenology from Merleau-Ponty sought to articulate the liveliness of living, and of space in interaction. ‘Merleau-Ponty was attempting to produce a more robustly intuitive account of knowledge, one not predicated on the prior existence of the subject, but rather productive of it’ (Thrift 2007: 54). In his earlier attention to a phenomenological notion of ‘dwelling’, social anthropologist Tim Ingold articulated a continuity of practice (Ingold 2000). More recently he has sought to amend, or update dwelling with ‘inhabitation’, but only as a footnote (Ingold 2008). In his other more recent work, on creativity and on lines, the direction of his thinking is clearer. Far from understanding dwelling as continuity, his work points to the everyday potential actuality of ‘the new’, the emergent (Hallam and Ingold 2007). He uses the notion of lines to express his thinking; they are made non-linear in human living as they circle, scan and trace, and thus speak of performance and uncertainty, discontinuity, breaks and reformulation (2007).

Familiar attention focuses upon the idea of city and other similar aggregates and abstractions of life. Instead, Grosz fills out how this notion of space can be applied. ‘By “city” I understand a complex and interactive network that links together, often in an unintegrated and ad hoc way, a number of disparate social activities, processes, relations, with a number of architectural, geographical, civic and public relations’ (Grosz 1995: 105). Individuals do not live in a ‘city’ or ‘country’ but in groups of friends, families, looser and stronger networks, gardens; pubs and clubs, sport field and shopping malls, beaches where they meet and enjoy time, group leisure venues and workspaces; briefer moments in transit, relationally with other-than human things, emotions, dreams and fears. Space is fleshy, lived.

In terms of our engagement with the material and metaphorical world we inhabit, this kind of embedded-fragmented perspective emphasizes process and encounters and offers a way of reasoning individuals’ participation in and of space. ‘Spacing’ is the potentiality of unsettling and possibly momentary resettling of things, feelings and thoughts in the eruption of energies and in the vitality of energy and the interstices between things. It is in the liveliness that creativity emerges. Their notion of spacing opens up ways for further thinking and ideas through which to explain process, the way things happen in flirting ‘with’ space in a way that we can net energies of phenomenology and social constructivism. ‘Spacing’ emphasizes capacity and energies for change; abrupt or steady, mingling and diverging, non linear; part accumulating and non-accumulative, discontinuous and held on to, uncertain; the unexpected and unbidden (Crouch 2003a).

The energetic potential, or the potential of multiple energies around, in and of us is gathered in Deleuze and Guattari in their particular application of the notion of ‘becoming’: moments and occurrences of change, as explicated in Chapter 3 of this volume in relation to their notion of performativity as hybrid of performance. By engaging human activity in a wider world they expanded the complexity, multiplicity and possibility not only of things and [their] vitality, including humans, but also the ways in which we might address, consider and enfold things. With them we can, rather than forget phenomenology, take the becoming of phenomenology further.

Deleuze and Guattari articulated the potential that things have, and the ways in which things that we do may energize anew the world around us. They write of the blacksmith, working matter ‘not a question of imposing a form upon matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces’ (2004, op cit. 363). As De Landa expands,

the blacksmith treats metals as active materials, pregnant with morphogenic capabilities, and his role is that of teasing a form out of them, through a series of processes (heating, annealing, quenching, hammering) the emergence of a form, a form in which the materials have their say. (De Landa 1999: 34)

Space is partly constituent of materiality, relationally. Space is not the distances between and amongst, or the outline of things. Objects and movements and mutual interactions include these elements in spacing. Soil and roots in the garden, cans in the street, stuff in our homes, sand on the beach, bollards by the supermarket become involved in spacing and become very sensual, emotive and experiential components of living. These reveal cogent reminders that human beings still desire encounters with what is felt to be real, as we speak, in an experience that is increasingly pre-occupied, in the writing at least, with virtual objects, representations and simulacra (Baudrillard 1988).

Elements of a contingent lay cultural and geography emerge, through a practical ontology of feeling, doing and thinking. It is emergent in spacing, a process that is kinaesthetically sensual, intersubjective and also extra-human in affective constitution, expressive and poetic. Creativity is informed through combinations of different times and life durations and rhythms, different registers and intensities of experience. Each of these is constitutive of life journeys: potentially creative, contingent, awkward and not blocked in representation. From this reflection on spacing, whilst ‘place’ may continue in popular exchange, it seems superfluous in the face of the interpretive power of ‘spacing’. The term place may have significant fluid connotations, but it is also archetypal in for example popular tourism literature: the synagogue or temple to be visited, the ‘vibrant city’, ‘vibrant city’. These ‘places’ offer new fixity. It is difficult to relate place to process conceptually. The process of constituting the knowledges is creative and is examined empirically and conceptually through the chapters of this book.

Thus space is in the action and vitality of living; in the co-ordinates of social, economic, cultural and physical influences as Massey has familiarly argued; but also, in this melee, the myriad and multiple energies of things and life, and between those things. As human beings we participate in that action. In an apparent need or desire to a feeling that we need to ‘know’, to momentarily settle things and our positions in the world, we imagine or feel moments of things that seem identifiable and so hold a grasp of what we call space, as momentarily objectified, given meaning in an objectifying/subjective way.

For me, spacing offers a new provocation to thinking, alert to more possibilities of the way things work and may happen, and their multiple (dis)connections. What they do not do is offer how flesh may be put onto, or rather inside, what may happen and how. Phenomenology offers ways of fleshing out life, and I soon engage this thinking in relation to spacing. Deleuzian thinking resis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Flirting with Space
• 2 Everyday Abstraction: Geographical Knowledge in the Art of Peter Lanyon
• 3 Spacing, Performing and Becoming: Tangles in the Mundane
• 4 The Play of Spacetime
• 5 Expressive Encounters
• 6 Landscape and the Poetics of Flirting (with) Space
• 7 Some Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index