Strange Spaces

Explorations into Mediated Obscurity

André Jansson, Amanda Lagerkvist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138250246
• eBook ISBN: 9781351897822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Certain bizarre spaces, where disruption or disarray rule, leave us estranged and 'out of place'. This book examines such spaces, highlighting the emotional and mediated geographies of uncertainty and the state of being 'in-between'; of cognitive displacement, loss, fear, or exhilaration. It expands on why space is sometimes estranging and for whom it is strange. It is the first book to link strangeness and spatial production, as well as empirical explorations of strange spaces within a profound theoretical discussion of 'what is strange about strange spaces' and how they evolve in a modern media age.

Chapter 1
What is Strange about Strange Spaces?

André Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist

Introduction

When crossing the Malaccan strait between Malaysian Penang and Indonesian Sumatra travellers board a ferry – or perhaps a facsimile of a ferry – that used to commute between the two Swedish islands of Öland and Gotland in the Baltic Sea in the 1970s and 80s. Now ostensibly transposed to this part of Southeast Asia, the boat is a strange space, refurbished with worn-out and ill-suited airplane seats, reeking of cigarette smoke. By force of being in the wrong place, these seats carry heavy connotations of disaster: in (and even under) water, they seem to tell a story about a recent or ominous emergency. The boat travels in waters repeatedly hit by pirate attacks in one of the most important cargo routes for shipping trade in the world. Such circumstances bring additional thrill or fear to this space, invoking a cinematic sense of emotional estrangement. News reports about capsized and submerged ferries in this area add to the strangeness of these ferry lines on a symbolic and representational level; at least for certain foreign travellers. For Swedish tourists spending their past summers on Öland or Gotland, additional obscurity is afforded to the experience since the relocated boats evoke the sunny memories of other holiday geographies, far away and far back in time.

This ferry constitutes an example of what Michel Foucault suggestively termed a heterotopia: a space in which spatial and temporal discrepancies converge and where different sites that are in themselves incompatible or irreducible to one-another are juxtaposed (Foucault 1967/1998). The boat, Foucault argues, is the ‘heterotopia par excellence’. As it moves it is nowhere and somewhere at the same time. It is also a finite space which is a reserve for infinite imaginations: ‘The boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea’. Foucault holds that boats fuel cultural fantasies and that ‘[i]n civilizations without boats dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates’ (1967/1998, 244). The arcane and semiotically overloaded space of the ferry is not only a symbolic ‘watershed’, a transitional vessel that moves back and forth between one national and cultural terrain and another, but also a space of displacement on several levels, bringing about an immensely obscure spatial experience.

This book approaches those bewildering and sometimes unspeakably bizarre spaces where disruption or disarray leave social subjects estranged and out of place. It engages the emotional and mediated geographies of uncertainty and in-betweenness; of cognitive displacement, loss, fear or exhilaration. It expands on why space is sometimes estranging and for whom is it strange. What kinds of perceptual, material and mediated transformations render space strange and obscure? What does it mean to be in estrangement?

In the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language estrangement has nine entries: to remove something from its familiar place; to make someone a stranger to a condition of place; to withhold from a person’s perception or knowledge; to render alien; to alienate in feeling or affection; to make unlike oneself; to render strange or unfamiliar in appearance; to be astonished. Such definitions have in common the sense that strange spaces are produced by and produce moments when we are faced with a transformed state of affairs: either by a dazzling light, a sudden flash, or by gradual unfolding of moments foreboding something unknown or new. Overlapping with affections evoked by otherness, such as the ‘exile’, the ‘obscene’, the ‘deviant’ or the ‘queer’, strange spaces also call for a separate discussion ranging from unplanned spaces to vanishing spaces in states of ruin or decay; from spaces of decadence or disorder to spaces glowing with celebrification and wonder. Strange spaces are here conceived of in terms of change, involving processes when the consciousness registers a form of loss or difference ‘as the habitual suddenly or by degrees is transformed into the site of exile, discomfort, and sometimes novelty, astonishment and awe’ (Smith 1996, 4).

This is to say that in this book we want to approach strangeness not merely in terms of the ‘unfamiliar’ or ‘other’, but rather as a psycho-cultural spectrum of spatial opacity, marked not only by interpretive conflict or surprise, but also by an embodied sense of paradox, bewilderment and moral unease. Still, given these demarcations, there is of course a great body of relevant literature covering aspects of both strangeness and spatial production; literature waiting to be reinterpreted and combined in new ways. Similarly, empirical explorations of the mediated aspects of strange spaces, or the strangeness of media spaces, are dispersed and most often non-explicit. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to offer a realm of theoretical associations and linkages in order to initiate a profound discussion of ‘what is strange about strange spaces’; a question that each of the following 14 chapters will provide empirically grounded, yet partial answers to. We begin with a broad exploration of views, concepts and methodologies within social and cultural theory, under the headings ‘Space is Strange’ and ‘Everyday Elsewheres’. A discussion of the role of ‘communication’, ‘mediation’ and ‘representation’ follows, aiming to position the book within the emerging field of communication geography. Finally, we present the thematic structure of the book.

Space is Strange

Following Henri Lefebvre, this volume places the opaque at the centre of spatial exploration (1974/1991). Inaugurating an analysis of the socially produced interplay between spatial practices, representations of space and lived experience, Lefebvre showed that while representations of space and representational spaces seemingly naturalized space, they simultaneously made them made them contradictory, even making them evaporate. Lefebvre argued that ‘the illusion of immanence’ had made us believe that space was utterly and straightforwardly knowable while in fact it is encoded by multiple and differing meanings. And although representations of space express a lot, Lefebvre maintains that they hide, lose and set aside a great deal more – that is, those unfathomable, vague and strange dimensions of spatiality.

If opacity informs the fundamental human experience of space, for Julia Kristeva, estrangement and exile lie at the heart of subjectivity. Subjective existence is unhomely and the most intense forms of estrangement are produced by poetic language (Kristeva 1991). The poetic word takes subjects beyond themselves when language compensates for an original loss of the mother. The landscapes of literature are inhabited by a foreignness which makes all of us travelling there imaginatively into exiles: in order to take pleasure in reading, one needs to let go of the habitual, to become strangers to ourselves. What is strange about strange spaces, however, lies beyond imaginative travels and subject formation by means of reading experiences and arises out of a shift in perception and a change of the state of affairs, involving the whole body, the senses and the emotions. But their strangeness also, as this volume seeks to explore, have a great deal to do with the current transitions in the media landscape and the momentous and significant mediatization of society during the twentieth century. Coming to terms with strange spaces thus forces our attention on to a particular form of spatial obscurity: mediated obscurity. In our media age, incongruities sometimes occur because of a kind of overburdening of space by means of representation. Thirdspaces (as will be further elaborated below) are the real-and-imagined spaces where the mythological and symbolic landscapes of mediation converge with physical spaces resulting in ambivalences, ambiguities and conflations between the material and mediated (Soja 1996). Obscurity is thus increasingly, we argue, a mediated and mediatized trait of our media age and Strange Spaces pays particular attention to the relationships between space and media and to the specificities of mediated strangeness. Moving from physical to textual/visual/ mediated spaces into representational spaces or mediatized outer space, or further into the unutterable thirdspaces, nowheres and underworlds, this book endeavours to unearth both the architectonics and agencies of strange spaces.

Keeping in play these uncertainties and opacities of space, the volume seeks to expand on Foucault’s enigmatic notion of the heterotopia, a concept which may allow for strange and unforeseen explorations. The heterotopia is a counter-site that simultaneously expresses core ideals and values of a respective society. A heterotopia is an ‘effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’ (1967/1998: 239). These counter-sites, existing in every society, are there. They are both openly acknowledged as existing, yet not freely accessible; they are institutionalized places, places which are outside of all other places, but nevertheless linked to them (such as the cemetery, the Chinese garden, the ward or the museum). Heterotopias come in two forms: heterotopias of crisis (hidden or forbidden places of people in crisis or of disorder: adolescents or menstruating women) and of deviance (rest homes and prisons for example).

What is strange about the heterotopias? Some specific heterotopian traits may crucially inform our discussion of strange spaces. Heterotopias are subject to historical changes and they may function in different ways at different times; they juxtapose irreconcilable sites within themselves and they come about when people are displaced through a break with the ordinary routines of temporality. What is strange about them is further the twofold way that they either create a space of illusion which discloses that the real world is even more illusory or the way that they create an other space; which makes us aware of the incompleteness of our messy and jumbled spaces (Foucault 1967/1998, 243).

Heterotopias are known physical spaces with certain predictable functions. Strange spaces may however appear to us in ways we never expected. They are not even in our wildest dreams. We neither had knowledge of such strange spaces, nor could we ever have imagined their existence. They shake our spirits. Still the strangeness of space sets in motion a search for apprehending something else ‘beyond each plane surface, beyond each opaque form’ (Lefebvre 1974/1991, 183). This is why strange spaces, that leave us speechless and bemused, are neither impenetrable nor completely unknowable: ‘Everything knows itself, but not everything says itself, publicizes itself. Do not confuse silence with secrets! That which is forbidden from being said, be it external or intimate, produces an obscure, but not a secret, zone’ (Lefebvre 1992/2004, 17). Taking our cue from Lefebvre, we are in search of whys, hows and whereabouts of estranging spaces – of their social production. Michel Foucault, who was most of all concerned with the prohibitions of/in space and with the margins of spatial organization (the prison, the cemetery, the psychiatric clinic) shed light on deviance in a way that contributes to our inquiry into strange spaces: deviance may sometimes be both the product and the process of estrangement. Resembling this is Lefebvre’s notion of the power invested in space and the power exerted on subjects by space: ‘Activity in space is restricted by that space, space “decides” what activity may occur, but even this “decision” has limits placed upon it. Space lays down the law because it implies a certain order and hence also a certain disorder (just as what may be seen defines what is obscene) […]’ (1974/1991, 143). This implies that the social production of space always incorporates the opposites and the unspoken ‘obscenities’, as constitutive of social and spatial arrangements.

A dominant allegory for the strange space of the ‘postmodern city’ is that of collage. Within this imaginary it is posited as a largely illegible ‘text’, a shifting complex entity, an unfathomable, heterogeneous web of practices and relations. Depending upon where you stand, Michel de Certeau argues, you appropriate the city differently: either in terms of an aerial overview and an omniscient gaze upon an urban spectacle in the distance – those mediated image ideals that express the grand narratives of ‘concept space’ or from the street level, encompassing the messy routines, spatial practices and seemingly unreadable urban cultures of the quotidien (de Certeau 1984). Calling into question the very idea about coherence, the collage city is an ambiguous and contrary space where different voices collide and where order and disorder, sanitation and defiance, planning, and uncertainty, image ideals and urban cultures are irresolvably entangled. If we embrace this position of the city as a differentiated space belonging to several ontologies – to poetry and geometry, emotion and struggle, image and materiality – it cannot be understood as a synthetic totality. The city is a multi-sited spatial formation produced across diverse discursive regimes, representational modes and material everyday practices, perhaps in some respects strange by its very form (cf. Balshaw and Kennedy 2000). This volume seeks to bring out the polyvalency of strangeness yet without resorting to a comfortable postmodern position where for example city space is posited as complex, chaotic and inscrutable a priori. We intend to move beyond the face value of the obscure and to expound the sociality of strange spaces and attend to them as produced within society – as laden with power geometries (Massey 1994, 2005). Important questions to be raised are: for whom is the naturalized, invisible spatial texture we take for granted strange? For whom is the strangest of places perfectly lucid, familiar, even ‘at home’?

As spatial experiences are contextually bound, these meanings shift over time, but they also depend upon the intersectional power asymmetries that produce spaces lived and experienced differently by different people (see e.g. Rose 1993). Sexual or racial discrimination for example – in its varied forms and across multiple intersections – is apart from humiliating also quite estranging, resulting in bizarre orders, obscure spaces and systems of oppression (for example the slavery system, the brothel, the harem, the suburban home of 1950s America). What was termed ‘consciousness-raising’ by second-wave feminism, the ability within emancipatory movements of whirling (spatial) norms – of estranging what seems normal or natural in a specific societal, historical and cultural context – will convey a counter-narrative about strange spaces. Queer theory for example raised the awareness of heteronormativity, a term suited for disclosing and turning upside-down the normality of straight spaces (Butler 1990; Bell and Binnie 1994; Skeggs et al. 2004).

But what is perhaps less projectable is that being positioned in estranging, yet normative ways, may also engender ‘strange responses’ or even a form of unanticipated empowerment emanating from the obscene (or non-seen) off-spaces of the oppressed (de Lauretis 1987). An obscure order – patriarchy – turns woman into, for example, an impossible position to occupy. The strange space of the female body is massively burdened by representation and hence it is left, as Teresa de Lauretis says, vacant. Such vacancies potentially generate new and unexpected positions. de Lauretis’s critical feminist project evoked a subject for feminism through theorizing those undefinable (and yet potentially liberatory) elsewheres that we are curiously roaming in throughout this book:

For that ‘elsewhere’ is not some mythic distant past or some utopian future history. It is the elsewhere of discourse here and now, the blind spots or the space-off, of its representations. I think of it as spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati. (ibid.: 25)

Teresa de Lauretis describes the potential of empowerment from within: of movements from spaces represented by/in discourse and by/in the gender system to the ‘the space not represented yet implied (unseen) in them’ (ibid., 26). This is described as a movement ‘between the (represented) discursive space of the positions made available by hegemonic discourses and the space-off, the elsewhere of those discourses’. Such discursive and social other spaces, de Lauretis argues, exists within hegemonic discourses, albeit on their margins (ibid.). Strange emancipatory space is constituted, according to de Lauretis, of what the representation leaves out, or, more pointedly, what it makes unrepresentable. The movement between represented space and off-space is not a dialectic or an integration but is made up of tensions of contradiction, multiplicity and heteronomy.

Our attempt to get a grasp on strange spaces may also be conceived as the retaining of such irreducible contradictions and as a project which potentially relocates subjects in ways that may generate new spaces for critical exchange and radical response. Silence and prohibition, deviance and marginality may thus be conceived of as one dimension of strangeness, one facet that does not exhaust the matter. We wish to bring spatial obscurities – which arise either out of outlawing and outright discrimination, or out of surprises, shifts, transitions and complexities in our everyday lives – onto a plane where they become observable, noticeable and analysable, always in awareness that as much as strange spaces need to be teased out in relation to their social cultural and political context, their opacities and obscurities are never reducible to them. In addition, their strangeness cannot be reduced into one formula or form of explanation. From such a vantage point we may for example acknowledge that modernist spaces of ordered perfection, reason, ab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 What is Strange about Strange Spaces?
• Part 1: Scales of Opacity
• Introduction to Part 1
• Part 2: Dislocation, Disruption, Disobedience
• Introduction to Part 2
• Part 3: Secrets and Wonders of Media Spaces
• Introduction to Part 3
• Name Index
• Subject Index