[Previous entry: "investment"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Tentative list"]

07/11/2004 Archived Entry: "Reynolds"

Back to Nedra Reynolds' book Geographies of Writing:
A serious problem I find with this text is its over emphasis on "dwelling." Reynolds tells us that "dwelling is not only about where but also about how - a set of embodied spatial practices," (158), and here I see the text's overall flaw. One could read Reynolds as possible suggesting a sense of "shifting" in place and then how that transfers to writing. But that's not what she's doing at all. She's emphasizing the stationary and permanent nature of place - dwelling does not change. The book stresses the point when it repeatedly associates place with the permanent tropes of cultural studies: race, gender, and class. Every so-called shifting position is read through the lends of this triad. The result is very predictable. Place is read over and over through some kind of insider/outsider expectation: you are white/the neighborhood is black, you are straight/the neighborhood is gay, you are upper class/the neighborhood is lower class. What's the purpose here? One already knows the answer before one begins. Or to phrase it differently: the one (Reynolds) who reads another’s spatial experience already knows the answer before the answer is given.
Such is the problem with topos - the places of argument. To return to the threads from a few days ago on this blog, this book represents a literate attempt to understand place and writing. The topos represent the predictability of argumentation and have served literacy well for some time now. But new media, with its problems with representation, its interest in mood, its usage of code to complicate discourse, its semantic linkings, rss feeds, hypertexts, etc., often is unpredictable - at least when users first encounter it or resist the impulse to adjust its logic to print. We are not dwelling in place, as Reynolds argues. We are moving. We are shifting. We are mixing.
I've also been reading Marc Augè's work on place - no place - and in In the Metro we get a better idea of globalization, the digital, and the individual who is not settled in at all in a dwelling. Augè's ideas don't seem to fit (at least not as I read them now) with the concept of the interconnected network, but I think he is complicating matters much more than Reynolds who seems to find solace in the comfortable familiarity of race, class, gender, as well as finding meaning in place (One passage describes a student searching out graffiti in a business district so that she can document "transgression." What better example of predictably than this can you ask for?)
For me, the issue is Detroit. I am not dwelling in Detroit (well, sure, I don't even actually live in the city, but on the other side of 8 Mile, yet I am in the city by work, place, association....). Detroit is my choral point of rhetorical production. Chora is the digital update of the topos. It can be understood through my relationship to Detroit. I got make a book out of that!

Posted by cbd @ 07/11/2004 06:27 PM EST

In contrast to Reynolds' ideas of space, see the Florida Research Ensemble's work:
floridaresearchensemble.net.
Ulmer will have a nice piece on the mapping of the Miami River in Marcel and my collection on The Florida School.

Posted by j @ 07/11/2004 02:20 PM EST