The final frontier

Shell Station, Newton, KS

Arrived in Memphis yesterday, but had to sit most of the day out. Chills, fever, and general nastiness. After regaining some equilibrium, got up this morning to see a panel on “Postmodern Variations on a Theme of Agency.” R. Scot Barnett delivered a paper titled “Spatializing Rhetorical Agency: Capacities for Action in Non-Place” or something like it (I can’t accurately remember who changed the titles of their papers and who didn’t). Barnett’s paper was interesting to me because it suggested that defining spaces in terms of “presence” or “lack” did not address the way that space is “performed.” The theme of possession that is part-and-parcel of these conventionalized modes of thinking about space misses key aspects of the way that we commonly encounter space.

Using the term “non-place” set up some fierce debates in the Q&A afterward, particularly in regard to the third paper by John Mucklebauer about Levinas (the title on that one changed severely and I didn’t note it). “Locative Art and Rhetorical Agency” by David Rieder hit on some of the same cylinders. Using some pomo critics that I’m not familiar with, they suggested that regularized spaces like airports, Starbucks, etc. promote a feeling of “non-place.” It didn’t ring true for me. The thought that occurred to me (which I said nothing about, due to a sore throat) is that these sorts of regularized spaces are much like what Latour called “immutable mobiles,” transportable spaces that make us feel at once “at home” and “displaced.”

This reminded me about taking the photograph (above). The woman inside the gas station wanted to know what I was taking pictures of—I answered “wide open spaces.” Every space is a little different, and lots of places do not feature empty space. The idea of a non-space (according to the academic who verged on heckling) is absolutely ludicrous. If it’s not in space, we can’t conceive of it.

Carolyn Miller’s paper in this same session forged a distinction between “potential” and “kinetic” energy—a distinction as difficult to conceptualize as “non-space.” The primary way I could translate it to myself is the distinction between the inertia of a moving body and a potential for movement present in a body at rest. When Miller talked about it, kinetic energy seemed like the most positive attribute of human interaction; naming it as inertia places it in a different light.

A friend asked a few days ago: “how many pictures of the back-ass of a gas station can you take?” It seems to me that there are endless variations on the theme of place.

May 27, 2006 4:41 PM