marcovaldo's Xanga

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:29:50 GMT

It is useful to contrast with this "sociological imagination" the rather more diffuse quality which I have called "spatial consciousness" or the "geographical imagination." This imagination enables the individual to recognize the role of space and place in his own biography, to relate to the spaces he sees around him, and to recognize how transactions between individuals and between organizations are affected by the space that separates them. It allows him to recognize the relationship which exists between him and his neighborhood, his territory, or, to use the language of the street gangs, his "turf." It allows him to judge the relevance of events in other places (on other peoples' "turf") -- to judge whether the march of communism in Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos is or is not relevant to him wherever he is now. It allows him also to fashion and use space creatively and to appreciate the meaning of the spatial forms created by others. This "spatial consciousness" or "geographical imagination" is manifest in many disciplines. Architects, artists, designers, city planners, geographers, anthropologists, historians, and so on have all possessed it. But it has a far weaker analytic tradition behind it, and its methodology still relies heavily upon pure intuition. The main seat of the spatial consciousness in western culture today still lies in the plastic arts.
This distinction between the geographical and sociological imaginations is artificial when we seek to relate to the problems of the city, but it is all too real when we examine the ways we think about the city. There are plenty of those possessed with a powerful sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills among them) who nevertheless seem to live and work in a spaceless world. There are also those, possessed of a powerful geographical imagination or spatial consciousness, who fail to recognize that the way space is fashioned can have a profound effect upon social processes -- hence the numerous examples of beautiful but unlivable designs in modern living.

- David Harvey, Social Justice and the City

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:25:08 GMT

Humanistic geography's most important reminder has been that we do not live in an abstract framework of geometric spatial relationships; we live in a world of meaning.

- Tim Cresswell, In place/out of place: Geography, ideology, and transgression

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:30:17 GMT

If it is possible to speak of a "man" with a masculine attribute and to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it is also possible to speak of a "man" with a feminine attribute, whatever that is, but still to maintain the integrity of the gender. But once we dispense with the priority of "man" and "woman" as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility.

- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:38:38 GMT

The point, my dears, is not good nor evil -- but freedom. For an angel there is only one true freedom, and that, I'm honestly sad to say, is freedom from God. Freedom is the cause and effect. In this particular Creation, if freedom from God (worship of God, dependency on God, obedience to God) is what you're after, then I'm afraid evil's really the only game in town. What I'd like, what I'd love, is to have been given a nature that didn't even know God -- the fish in the pond who doesn't know life beyond it: the lawn, the house, the city, the country, the world . . .
Your thinkers wrestle with this notion of pure evil or, as they're so fond of calling it, evil for its own sake. I've no idea why. There's no such thing as evil for its own sake. All evil is motivated -- even mine. The torturer, the tyrant, the murderer, the consummate fabricator of fibs -- they're all doing it for something, even if they're doing it for pleasure. (The problem your thinkers have is understanding quite how the evildoer gets pleasure from his evil, but that's a different question.) Evil for its own sake is -- or would be if it existed -- madness; and even the barmy do what they do for some barmy reason. What pains the Old Boy most is not that I do evil, but that I do what causes me excruciating pain. What pains Him is that even perpetual and excruciating pain is a price worth paying for disentangling myself from Him. That's the crux of it. That's what He can't stand.

- Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:21:01 GMT

I never really wanted this job. (As all dictators whine.) Trouble was, when we found ourselves in Hell everyone looked at me. (How to describe Hell? Disembowelled landscape busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain and the din of . . . If only. Hell is two things: the absence of God and the presence of time. Infinite variations on that theme. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Well, trust me.)

- Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

Monday, January 12, 2009

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:58:32 GMT

Scale fucks with my head. Angelic scale with human head, human scale with angelic head -- oy. You go dizzy. What does one do -- having been immaterially present at the Divine ejaculation that brought matter into being -- what does one do with...a daisy? How is consciousness -- especially the troubled hybrid I'm walking around with at the moment -- to reconcile these extremities? Having observed newborn galaxies tossed prodigally, milkily, into the void, having straddled event horizons and strolled bodilessly 'twixt time's wrinkles and matter's loops -- how, exactly, am I to accommodate the crenulations of Harriet's toenails? Am I to apprehend seconds and caraway seeds that have called aeons trifles and held gas-giants baubles fit for a Heavenly whore?

- Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

Monday, January 12, 2009

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:54:15 GMT

The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.

- Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:12:13 GMT

Ubiquity, though, sometimes seems like banality. Perhaps its universal nature makes it seem uninteresting, but its universality is precisely what also makes [mobility] a powerful part of ideologies of one kind or another in specific times and places.

- Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World

Monday, September 01, 2008

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:01:13 GMT

There is no natural or best way to classify anything; all categories are useful rather than true...

- David Lowenthal, "Geography, experience, and imagination: towards a geographical epistemology," published in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51(3), 1961

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:18:01 GMT

"I've seen many American cities," Zamyatin expounds. "Nearly every building in them has been demolished so that no one can revisit their past except in memory, and people's memories now must accommodate a great many things because of what they see on television. Maybe when they think of their old house, they substitute for it a Venetian palazzo, a Mongol yurt, or a Buddhist temple from a travel documentary. It must be exhausting to squat in someone else's memories."

- Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield (p. 260)