Space Beyond Disclipines

8/10/2019 Space Beyond Disclipines

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Introduction

For the last three decades of the twentieth century much of the most inno-

vative scholarship in the humanities focused on how meaning was conveyedthrough language. Even in fields, such as architecture, which were notexplicitly linguistic, the assumption was widespread that the structure oflanguage of fered insights how humans structured and experienced theirenvironment. More recently, however, space has begun to be perceived asequally fundamental to human experience and thus to the disciplines whichaddress the diversity of that experience. In his book Tirdspace: Journeysto Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places, published in , the

cultural geographer Edward Soja argued that space is as important as his-tory and society and that the spatial dimension of our lives has never beenof greater practical and political relevance than it is today.Soja based hisclaim upon recent work in geography, cultural studies, and postcolonialtheory, as well as his own reading and that of the architectural historianDolores Hayden of environments in and around Los Angeles. Nor is his alone voice. e spatial turn now occupies scholars from disciplines acrossthe humanities and social sciences. Attentiveness to space and to place

informs the cutting edge even in disciplines such as philosophy (for exam-ple in the work of Edward Casey) which would at first glance seem moreremoved from this new current than geography or architecture.A numberof recent publications also emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of the

Edward W. Soja, Tirdspace:Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-ImaginedPlaces(Oxford: Blackwell, ), .

Edward S. Casey, Te Fate o Place: A Philosophical History(Berkeley, CA: Universityof California Press, ).


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spatial paradigm. Cross-fertilization between areas such as literary studiesand human geography, history and sociology, archaeology and computerstudies, art history and architecture ensures that the exploration of spaceand place, both real and imagined, contributes to a multifaceted investiga-tion of such contemporary concerns as identity and memory.

e range of avenues opened for exploration has been enormous. reeexamples of dif ferent approaches to memory in Berlin will suf fice. JamesYoung, a member of an English department; Sabine Hake, who teachesGerman; and the sociologist Jennifer Jordan have all published books which

focus on specific spaces in the city. Hake compares carefully chosen set-tings in Berlin during the Weimar Republic and the debates over plans tochange them with their depiction in the literature and film of the period.Youngs original focus upon Holocaust Memorials expanded to includearchitecture; in both cases he has come to consider the detailed history of

particular sites.Jordans work on commemoration in contemporary Berlinis even more explicitly spatial, as she revisits the scene of the crime, so tospeak, to see how sites of Nazi horror are marked or forgotten today.

e explosion in the literature about space comes at a time of greatfears about rootlessness and placelessness. is is apparent, for example,

See for example, Barney Warf and Santa Arias (eds), Te Spatial urn. InterdisciplinaryPerspectives(London: Routledge, ), Jrg Dring and Tristan ielemann (eds),Spatial urn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschafen(Bielefeld:transcript Verlag, ), Lothar Hnnighausen, Julia Apitzsch and Wibke Reger(eds), Space Place Environment(Tbingen: Stauf fenberg, ); and ClausClver, Vronique Plesch and Leo Hoeck (eds), Orientations. Space/ ime/ Image/Word(Amsterdam: Rodopi, ). e cross-fertilization between theorists fromvastly dif ferent disciplines that deal with space and place has also been highlightedby Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchain and Gill Valentine (eds),Key Tinkers on Space andPlace(London: Sage Publications, ), .

Sabine Hake, opographies o Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in WeimarBerlin(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, ).

James E. Young,At Memorys Edge: Afer-Images o the Holocaust in ContemporaryArt and Architecture(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ).

Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlinand Beyond(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, ).


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Introduction

when looking at the concern with urban spaces, or when focusing on therelationship between local and global identities. It is no accident, then, thatmuch of the new theorizing about space Soja and Hayden are cases inpoint is strongly associated with Los Angeles.e first major Americancity whose suburbs outstripped its downtown in importance, Los Angeles isoen understood to have a largely transient population and to be in dangerof itself being destroyed by a variety of potential apocalypses.Althoughtrading networks for both goods and ideas have grown steadily for centuries,recent discussions of globalization have drawn renewed attention to the

economic forces that appear to many to be encouraging unwelcome homo-geneity.is may be a product in part of the degree to which academicswriting on related topics now travel so much themselves. In the past fewdecades the number of conferences and their importance to careers haveincreased exponentially, and few environments are as ubiquitously banalas the postwar university classroom.Rooted in many cases less and lessin their own institutions and communities and more and more in interna-tional research networks which keep them tethered to their laptops, such

scholars turn almost nostalgically to the cityscapes which no longer seem

Edward Soja teaches urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles, andwritten extensively about the city. Mike Davis, who teaches at nearby Riverside, is themost important contemporary contributor to these myths. See his City o Quartz:Excavating the Future in Los Angeles(New York, NY: Verso, ), andEcology oFear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster(New York, NY: Metropolitan,). See also Reyner Banham,Los Angeles: Te Architecture o Four Ecologies(NewYork, NY: Harper and Row, ).

For a critique of this myth see Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, ).

e key publication for the study of globalization was Saskia Sassen, Global Cities:New York, London, okyo(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ).

For a satirical view of academic conferences see David Lodge, Small World(London:Macmillan, ); for the environments in which they are typically held, Stefan

Muthesius, Te Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College(London: YaleUniversity Press, ).


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so inherently alienating.At the same time, however, it is, according toHubbard, Kitchain and Valentine, the postmodern city, where categoriesof belonging are problematized, and where notions of a politics of dif fer-ence take on a heightened significance.

is book of fers a snapshot of recent work, most undertaken at Irishuniversities, addressing the implications of this paradigm shi for disci-

plines ranging from archaeology, architecture, and art history, to computerscience, geography, philosophy and, above all, literature. Like language,space is aer all fundamental to human experience. Few modern men and

women are as attune to orienting features in the landscape as our ances-tors, who needed to navigate without recourse to maps, much less GlobalPositioning Systems. Nonetheless, our construction and inhabitation ofinteriors and of the interstices between buildings that define communityfrom the scale of the farmyard to that of the metropolis are among the mostessential of all social activities. For precisely this reason no discipline has amonopoly on explaining why space matters and how it structures our dailylives and inspires our imagination. Architects are taught to design spaces

and geographers to map them, but it takes the full range of humanistsand social scientists to understand how we construct, inhabit, manipu-late, experience, imagine, and delimit them, themes to which our authorsreturn again and again, much less to understand the processes governingthis wide range of actions. Each contributor to this volume brings to thetask the specificity of their disciplinary expertise, and each was testedby the process to stretch in new directions towards fields that were onceuncharted territory for them.

Although men and women have been describing and creating spacesince the onset of language and of architecture, space as an explicit con-cept was used, in architecture and art history at least, only beginning inthe nineteenth century. German discussions of aesthetics, architecture,

Originally published in , see Georg Simmel, e Metropolis and Mental Life,in Te Sociology o Georg Simmel, compiled and translated by Kurt Wolf f (New York,

NY: Free Press, ), , for the classic view of modern urban alienation. Hubbard, Kitchain and Valentine,Key Tinkers, .


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Introduction

and art history led to its identification, which was closely bound to theemergence of empathy theory.Discussions of space were originally tiedto the developments of linkages between the study of art and architectureon the one hand and that of psychology and philosophy on the other, asintellectuals from a variety of disciplines sought to understand how worksof architecture, in particular, generate an emotional response. Althoughclosely linked to the scholarly rehabilitation of the Baroque, above all bythe Swiss art historian Heinrich Wlf f lin, the identification of spacesimportance to distinctions between Renaissance and Baroque art quickly

led to a new self-consciousness about the way in which space was deployedin fields as varied as theatre, architecture, and painting.eatre in theround, Cubisms manipulation of volumes in art and architecture, and thecentrality of the f lattening of the picture plane to the American art criticClement Greenbergs defence of Abstract Expressionist painting are allunthinkable without a way of discussing the way space is perceived andexperienced.

Much of the current spatial turn was inspired by reading of the French

sociologist Henri Lefebrves classics Te Production o Space, first publishedin , and translated into English in .Lefebvre, a Marxist, postu-lated that the production of space reproduces the social relations governingproduction. For Lefebvre, the study of spatial practices, representations ofspace, and representational spaces rather than linguistic systems of feredthe key to understanding both the way in which society was structuredand the germ of alternatives to that structuring.

Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleherios Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space:Problems in German Aesthetics, (Santa Monica, CA: Getty, ).

Heinrich Wlf f lin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (. Ithaca:Cornell, ).

e centrality of space to contemporary architecture was popularized above all inSigfried Giedion, Space, ime and Architecture(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, ).

Henri Lefebvre, Te Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (.Oxford: Blackwell, ). is work is particularly crucial for Soja.


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Although writers have long described particular places in ways thatencompass very exacting analyses of space, literary scholars have turnedtheir attention in this direction only recently, shiing their focus from aninterest in temporality to spatiality. Just as in other areas, the importanceof cross-disciplinary impulses is significant, especially between literarystudies and geography, as is indicated by titles of scholarly volumes such asBarbara PiattisDie Geographie der Literatur[e Geography of Literature],or Brown and IrwinsLiterature and Place.e importance ofspace and place in literature can, on the one hand, be explained with the fact

that, as Malcolm Bradbury states, a very large part of our writing is a storyof its roots in a place, a landscape, region, village, city, nation or continent.Just in the same way that rootedness in a particular place becomes the basisof many literary texts, however, the lack of rootedness has also become apopular focus and theme, equally ref lecting spatial concerns. e lack ofbelonging to a particular place linguistic, cultural or geographical is atthe very centre of identity formation and identity crises which are a majorconcern of many literary texts.

It is, of course, important to acknowledge that the representation of aparticular place in literature does not just invite to be compared to the realplace that serves as a model, but that through these spatial representationsideas and concepts are conveyed and important concerns are addressed.According to Brown and Irwin, representations of space and place in lit-erature do not just and oen not even primarily explore connections toempirical reality. Rather, imagined and real places alike perform an impor-tant function in the exploration of various aspects of identity, whether

Barbara Piatti, Die Geographie der Literatur. Schaupltze, Handlungsrume,Raumphantasien(Gttingen: Wallstein, ), Peter Brown and Michael Irwin(eds),Literature and Place (Oxford: Lang, ). On the spatial ortopographical turn see also Sigrid Weigel, Zum topgraphical turn. Kartographie,Topographie und Raumkonzepte in den Kulturwissenschaen, in KulturPoetik.Zeitschrif r kulturgeschichtliche Literaturwissenschaf (), .

Malcolm Bradbury, Introduction, in M. Bradbury (ed.), Te Atlas of Literature(London: De Agostini, ), unpag.


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Introduction

personal, social, or national.e fact that a volume titled Space. NewDimensions in French Studieswas published in the seriesModern FrenchIdentitiesis an example of the important role that has been attributed tothe representation and production of real and imagined spaces for theexploration of the question what makes us us.

Quite regardless if places a literary text refers to are imagined or ifthey exist on real maps, the constructed nature of place and space needsto be emphasized. As Winfried Fluck explains, all perceptions of space areconstructs.e boundaries between imagined and real places become

blurred, in order to gain cultural meaning, physical space has to becomemental space, more precisely, imaginary space.e significance of space and place to individual and group identity

has been widely acknowledged, and not just by literary scholars. In a studythat focuses on the global dimensions of space and place, John Rennie Shortstates that [the] identity of self, group and nation is bound up with ideasand representations of particular space,a statement which highlights thesubjective and constructed nature of the meaning of places and spaces.

Similarly, Hubbard, Kitchain and Valentine point out that [p]laces are[] relational and contingent, experienced and understood dif ferently bydif ferent people.

Whether we focus on actual physical spaces, constructed and inhabitedby real people who through the process of making them shape their ownidentities, or the spaces that structure our engagement with the imaginationof novelists by concretizing the settings in which their characters are placed,the study of space of fers fruitful means of conceptualizing humanitys

Brown and Irwin,Literature and Place, . Emma Gilby and Katja Haustein (eds), Space. New Dimensions in French Studies

(Bern: Lang, ) (=Modern French Identities ). Winfried Fluck, eories and Methods. Imaginary Space; or, Space as Aestethic Object,

in Hnnighausen, Apitzsch and Reger (eds), Space Place Environment, . ibid. John Rennie Short, Global Dimensions. Space, Place and the Contemporary World

(London: Reaktion Books, ), . Hubbard, Kitchain and Valentine,Key Tinkers, .


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relationship to our environment and the creativity unleashed by that rela-tionship. In a study onPlace and Space in Modern Fiction, Wesley A. Kortwarns of a merely abstract understanding of space that devalues particularlocations. He identifies, in modern narrative discourse a cultural locationwhere the language of place and space has a rightful role, generates positivecontent, emphasizes the particularity of places and of peoples relationsto them, and it stands not in opposition but in relation to the languageof actions and events, of time and history.is does equally apply, itseems, to the narrative of history, architecture, archaeology, or any of the

other disciplines from which the contributors to this volume have lookedat spatial configurations. e essays highlight, each in their own way, therole that concrete physical places and spaces play as contested sites andbuildings, as locations that individuals imbue with meaning and againstwhich they measure their feelings of belonging, but also as locations thatare transformed, re-constructed or re-imagined in their representation andthat take on a metaphorical as well as a physical meaning.

is book consists of three parts, each of which addresses a dif ferent

set of spatial relationships. e four essays in Negotiating Belonging dealparticularly with the link that exists between real and imagined places inliterary texts and with the questions of identity and belonging that thesespatial configurations help to address. Of particular importance for a rene-gotiation of identity are the position of the displaced or exiled individualand the notion of the in-between as a precarious space where belonging isa key question. All four essays focus on the way in which ideas and peoplemove through space from one place to another, as well as the impact these

transitions have upon their point of view. is is explored in literary textsfrom dif ferent centuries and literatures, and by four authors who are allliterary scholars, but who approach this topic from very dif ferent direc-tions. Sabine Strmper-Krobb opens with an essay examining the languageused to describe the process of translation. Her analysis focuses upon thedegree spatial metaphors are used to characterize this displacement of

Wesley A. Kort,Place and Space in Modern Fiction(Gainesville, FL: University Pressof Florida, ), .


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Introduction

meaning away from the language in which it was originally framed. In thesecond half of her essay she analyses the link between spatial metaphorsand the theme of translation in two novels arguing that in literature, justas in contemporary cultural studies, translation oen becomes a metaphorsignifying a space for redefining identity and reassessing belonging: Inboth novels discussed in her essay, Eva Hof fmans autobiographical workLost in ranslation, and the German post-Wende novel Unter dem NamenNormaby Brigitte Burmeister, this reassessment ultimately leads to theacceptance of identity as necessarily f luid and as constantly in process.

Like Strmper-Krobb in her analysis of Hof fmans autobiographical novel,Monica Francioso, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, and Florian Krobb take astheir subject the literal displacement of exile or of voluntary migration ortravel as experienced by individual characters in novels, supplemented, inthe case of Ribeiro de Menezes essay, by the novelists own position as anexile. Francioso identifies travel as a key theme and as a metaphor for iden-tity as an ever changing process inLe vie del ritorno, a novel by the Italianauthor Enrico Palandri. Here the kinetic sequence of a railroad journey

provides the space for the main character, the child of a Polish Holocaustsurvivor, who it is implied participated in a revolutionary political move-ment in Italy in the s, to re-conceptualize his relationship to Italy, towhich he is returning aer living for many years in Britain. Just as space isnot absolute but relational, identity is not fixed but constantly in processand constructed in movement, and for this, the train journey becomes theoverriding metaphor. However, Francioso also highlights the key role thatmemory, both personal and collective, plays for this process. is is a topic

also addressed in Ribeiro de Menezes essay. e focus here is not only uponanother exile, in this case the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, who movedto France during Francos dictatorship, but more specifically also on the wayin which dif ferent editions of his novel Seas de identidadaddress themain characters experiences as a traveller to Cuba. Like the authors of thefirst two essays, Ribeiro de Menezes examines the way in which notions ofidentity are conceptualized as physical space or territory. at Goytisolosperspective on both the homeland and destinations located far from it is

unstable is one of her key observations. Belonging, origin, and the roleof space and place in the exploration of an individuals orientation in the


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world is a the centre of Florian Krobbs analysis of Wilhelm Raabes latenineteenth-century German novel Stopuchen. At what Krobb describes asthe threshold of modernism, a time when increasing globalization broughtwith it the necessity to define oneself in ones relationship with the world,Raabe juxtaposes a narrator who has emigrated to South Africa with anarchaeologist who has literally excavated a local past. Krobb focuses inparticular on the dif ferent modes of relating to place, and on the interplaybetween the global and the local, that these two characters represent. ForKrobb, the novel addresses how one can possess a place. With the global

and the local Raabes novel juxtaposes two dif ferent spatial orientations.However the way in which this is represented eludes any clear evaluation;instead, the dif ferent spatial configurations show how the sense of spaceand the sense of place have become problematic and contested, any invest-ment of place with meaning is necessarily subjective.

e three essays in Public and Private Urbanity map the way inwhich four major European cultural figures and ordinary citizens haveacross the course of the last two centuries recorded their experience of

the modern city in order to structure their own identity as creators andcitizens. It opens with Henriette Steiner, who studied comparative litera-ture before enrolling in the doctoral programme in architecture at Cam-bridge. Steiner compares the way in which the Danish philosopher SrenKierkegaard conceptualized both the private interiors and public spacesof nineteenth-century Copenhagen. Here we again return to the problemof how to represent spatial experience, at the same time that the theme ofdif ferent types of spaces public and private, interior and exterior, real

and imagined is introduced. In Steiners observation that Kierkegaardswritings on Copenhagen are based on a poetics of walking the city, thelink between the actual experience of physical places and their imaginingand representation is indicated.

e connection between private interior and public spaces is also thefocus of Mary Gallaghers essay on two early twentieth-century texts bydif ferent French authors. Both Paul Valry and Marcel Proust use two anti-thetical imagined spaces in their texts: the intimate space of the bedroom

and the public space of the theatre. Gallagher examines the relationshipand metaphorical meshing between the two. In both Valrys Soire avec


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Monsieur Teste and Prousts Combray, the representation and evoca-tion of those antithetical spaces are used for the process of introspection.In Soire, the narrative is split between the private space of the Parisianapartment where the main character lives, and the public urban space ofthe theatre where the narrator witnesses an opera performance but wherehe concentrates mainly on the spectators and on his own introspection. InCombray, the public space of the theatre only exists in the main charactersimagination, as his youth still excludes him from actually visiting a theatre.Again, this public space is juxtaposed and intermeshed with the private

space of the bedroom in the provincial estate of the narrators childhood.In both texts, the transformation, through the description of the nightlyritual of going to bed, of the intimate space of the bedroom into a theat-rical space on the one hand, and the association of the public space withthe process of introspection on the other contribute to draw attention tothe specular nature of inwardness and to the dramatic, literary and artisticvalue of introspective narrative.

In the final essay in this section, Angela Merte-Rankin focuses on

another author fascinated by interior and exterior spaces in an urban envi-ronment, and on the way in which they are reconstructed by imagina-tion and memory. Her essay on how spaces and places are represented inWalter Benjamins writings about the Berlin of his childhood looks at howremembered spaces necessarily dif fer from those occupied in the present.Central to Merte-Rankins argument is the concept of implacement, theconstant construction and reconstruction of space and places in order tomake sense of ones being.

e third group of essays, grouped together under the heading Land-scapes, Borders, Sites, also directly addresses particular places, but it focusesupon boundaries. ese can be legal and social, real or imagined. e sixauthors address the spatial dimension of tensions between cultures and

political positions among people occupying the same territory from theperspectives of architecture, geography, literary history, archaeology, andeven computer science. e first two essays address the local Irish context.Gary A. Boyd focuses on the transformation of the Irish bog following

the creation of the Free State in . Paradoxically what had been seen asthe most backward aspect of the island was transformed into an engine of


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modernization as peat was used to fuel the generation of electric power instate of the art facilities. Garrett Carr of fers a specific answer to the questionof how landscape can possess an edge through his novel remapping of theborder between Northern Island and the Republic. Using graphic designand geography to reconfigure an alternative to conventional cartography,Carr proposes a post-national way to perceive an invisible line. DouglasSmith is also interested in the way in which borders mould experience as

well as define national boundaries. He situates the conceptualization ofthe Mediterranean in post-war France in relation to the outbreak of the

Cold War and the impending loss of Algeria. His diverse examples includea historian, a novelist, and an artist. Topographical metaphors are central tothis ef fort, which re-imagines the nation in relation to a changed definitionof the land it occupies. For Tadhg OKeef fe, an archaeologist, the ruins ofthe World Trade Center prompt a consideration of the violence integralto the colonization of North America. OKeef fe postulates that althoughruins appear inimical to American modernity, they are in fact integral tomodernization. Kathleen James-Chakraborty brings an architectural histo-

rians perspective to the debate over the literal place of Germanys religiousminorities in the cityscape of Berlin and especially Cologne. Focusing onthe controversy over a monumental mosque designed by scions of a dynastyof designers of Catholic churches, she suggests that the very modernity ofthe building was part of what troubled opponents, who resented the mas-tery of their own culture by Turkish immigrants. Finally, Luigina Ciolfifocuses upon another contemporary border, the literal and the imaginativeinterface between the physical and digital worlds. Rather than reconfigur-

ing how to imagine literal boundaries, as Carr does, she addresses how todissolve them from the perspective of a designer of interactive technologies.Once again the question is of perception, specifically physical perceptionmediated by the digital, but the purpose is entirely dif ferent, as the designeris now focused on developing hard and soware rather than on literallymaking new physical places.

It should also be noted in closing that this collection testifies to twomore spatial turns in contemporary Irish academia. Only five of the thir-

teen authors grew up on the island; the other eight who reside here nowhave come from across Europe and the Atlantic. Trained in part or in


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whole abroad, they bring to the Irish discussion of space their own spatiallygrounded experiences of other classrooms and conversations. Equally note-

worthy is the geographical range of their examples, with native Irish scholarsand newcomers alike addressing topics that range across not just countriesbut even continents. Nine explore the continent of Europe, not from theperspective of the Wild Geese or the casual tourist, but as an appropriatesubject of informed scholarship by academics residing in Ireland, a coun-try whose own complex history and considerable literary heritage longmonopolized the attention of its humanists, while a tenth essay, written

by a native of Ireland, considers the United States.e wide geographical range of examples have, especially in the essaysthat deal with literary representations of space and place, naturally led toa range of languages in which these representations were originally com-posed. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the volume, and to facilitatean easier reading of the contributions, all quotations from languages otherthan English have been provided in translation. In the case of quotes fromliterary texts, where no published translation exists or where the contribu-

tor felt that original wording was necessary to support the argument, theoriginal version has been included in footnotes.Most of the essays gathered here were first presented at the conference

Imagining Space: Negotiating Cross Disciplinary errains, held at NewmanHouse on October and at the Humanities Institute of Ireland on October . In addition to the editors, the organizing committeeincluded Deidre OGrady and Vera Regan. We are grateful to the Collegeof Arts and Celtic Studies at University College Dublin, whose research

strand on Space and Place funded the event and has helped fund this book.We also gratefully acknowledge the receipt of UCD Seed Funding andof a subvention from the National University Ireland in support of thispublication.

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Space Beyond Disclipines