Re: The survival of settings

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Wed, 24 Sep 1997 00:30:29 -0400

Yes, these are wonderful inquiries about settings. My copy of MCA just
arrived in the mail and I hope to get to reading more of the sources of
these queries.

There is a growing interest in general social theory in the role of space,
place, and setting not just in microsocial interaction, but in macrosocial
structural relations and change. In Britain this seems to go under the name
of political geography, and there is a well-known book: _Justice, Nature,
and the Geography of Difference_ by David Harvey which presents an effort
at a synthesis that he call historical-geographical dialectical
materialism, in a neo-Marxist tradition deriving from Raymond Williams. The
geography here is not so much about mountains and rivers as about urban
spaces and human places and their role in maintaining and constituting
social class relations and the contexts of resistance.

Also mentioned here among other references is the work of Latour on
artifacts, which can certainly be extended from hand-held tools to
workbenches and classroom seating or arrangements of computers in
multimedia classrooms. Again we have issues of multiple spatial scales, and
processes, especially semiotic ones, that cross scale boundaries.

I am particularly interested in the issues raised about cyberspaces and
on-line places. What gives a literal space a sense of place? presumably
some semiotic dimensions, some ways people have of meaningfully being in
those spaces, so that we say the place comes to mean something to us, in
general, or when we are in it in a certain way-of-doing/being/meaning. So
the space does not have to be a literal one to acquire a sense of place, it
can also be our on-line xmca place, or the more visualized cyberspaces of
some chat (not CHAT) groups on line (e.g. The Palace, MUDs and MOOs). Texts
can define a place, signifiers in general can define a place -- but not in
just any way, and there is much to be learned about the semiotic
constitution of place.

'Settings' have many different theoretical models available. There are
those of 'context' as in 'context of situation' (originally from Malinowski
-- ethnographers are quite sensitive to place, cf. Bourdieu's classic study
of the Kabylian house) in the discourse analysis and ethnography of
communication traditions. There are the models of material spaces and
places, as discussed above, and deriving from the semiotics of architecture
and urban planning, and from traditions in historical research (cf.
Foucault on clinics and prisons, Fernand Braudel on the history of
dwellings and furnishings). And there are the elisions from psychology,
already noted, where it does seem that place is ignored in search of
universalizability, or, what is the same thing for me, because the 'mind'
became a place for psychology, where its imaginary processes were taking
place -- as opposed to formulating processes as practices which bodies
(including brains) engage in in the settings that fill normal space and time.

I'm sure there'll be more to say about all this, and I look forward to new
contributions from people here. JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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