* history positions us in time
* helps us anticipate the future
* reveals our competence
* reveals the means of resistance
* is ALWAYS a strategy
* is NEVER neutral
* has the power to sanction, censor, raise question
* there is no consensus about what history is or who it is practiced
* is today multidisciplinary and allows for intuition, empathy, memory, experience
* is no longer a grand narrative, but is multifaceted with many centers
* always remember to ask yourself, who’s history is this, who benefits
1a. CIRCULATION: A SOCIAL CONTRACT: circulation preoccupies critics of urban growth and transformation. In Haussmann’s Paris circulation was both a means of urban renovation, a means to get people into the streets (liberty and equality), a means of linking parts of the city together, and the key to privileging the faculty of vision. IT was also considered a poor apology for relentless change, global regulations, and control. REMEmber, circulation is not movement, it is a feature of movement. Circulation is the promise of public health and the failure of the promise. As a social contract, circulation is the relation between conformity and resistance, between the law and the application of the law. Benjamin believed that circulation was the creation of a distance: from past to present, tradition to contemporary life, and authentic experience to a life filled with seductive copies. He was searching for a way to rediscover a creative, responsible life that would reach beyond the political and economic goals of capitalism as they are expressed in the modern metropolis.
2. To go beyond the coercive symmetry of spatial form = spatial praxis:
* look for the fissures in history
* expose the openings and points of stress
* provide a different logic
* consider acts of detournement
* enliven our understanding of physical space
* consider qualities of life that we don’t master
* look for Foucault’s “animal spaces” that alter the terrain of history
* be sensitive to the small gestures in the tissue of everyday life that defy power
* consider how space is moved through, negotiated, and transformed by behavior
3. How to do this, a short list of possibilities -- just the beginning:
* UTOPIA/Eutopus (Good Place): Louis Marin: a threshold/neutral space in which opposing conditions of society coexist. This is the space BETWEEN the past/present; liberty/authority; mobility/dislocation; origins/modernity; memory/forgetting; ..... In this space of neutrality the problem and the resolution occupy the same territory
* COUNTERSPACES: Henri Lefebvre: A counterspace is not the space created by urban planners and engineers. Look to our bodies and the body’s rhythms. Consider how the the body creates connections, flows, intensities, processes, speeds. The body is like no other reality; it has an amplitude that cannot be controlled. The body produces the space it occupies, and sets unpredictable rhythms in motion that overthrow traditional spatial praxis
* WALKING: Michel de Certeau: views the practice of everyday life as the experience of surfaces, energies, links, processes that issue from unprecedented networks; we adapt the environment to our needs. Walking allows for surprises, errors, strange trajectories; it allows up to appropriate space for the moment; is an opportunity for personal resistance; transforms the city; experiments with space; modulates the environment; allows for drifts; creates liberty; produces fictions; and is when we become other than ourselves
* ALLEGORY, A POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVE: Paul de Man and Craig Owens, allegory as a counterspace that resists regulations, exaggerates discontinuity, is always ambiguous. For Owens, public space could be allegorical when it is governed by 1. appropriation 2. site specificity 3. accumulation and may feature impermanence or hybridity. Think about how these qualities of space can influence your understanding of the
non-lieu
* REFLECTION: For Benjamin: the physical space of the city reflects the economic space of capitalism. Benjamin wanted to restore true reflection to collective life. For him, the term describes the distance from day dreaming to self-awareness. Reflection would allow an individual to overcome the distractions and stimulation of consumer life, to be redeemed as an individual. In philosophical thought, Reflection is the capacity to put ourselves at a distance and consider ourselves as the object of inquiry. IN POSTMODERN THOUGHT: For Derrida Reflection is the space of difference, a distance where one idea or concept begins and the other ends. For Derrida, this is NOT a neutral space (as it is for Marin), but a complex interval with specific properties. What happens when we move from one concept to the next--for example, from the lieu to a non-lieu and visa versa. For Derrida this space is never one or the other. There is always overlap and excess. There are no pure concepts. Derrida wants to know what happens in this moment of reflection that leads from one idea to its opposite/to another: From city to body; presence/absence/; insight/domination. How can his understanding of reflection help you consider the non-lieu?
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