Re: importance of architecture

Jan Nespor (nespor who-is-at vt.edu)
Wed, 24 Sep 1997 17:45:11 -0500

>But I do like Jean Lave's emphasis on the dialectic of subjective and
>objective views of setting. The affordances and saliences of a materially
>constructed place for the actors in that place are a function of what they
>are doing there (cf. Umwelt), including the tools that are both extensions
>of them as actors and equipments of the place. We could possibly take
>'setting' as a term for the _lived-setting_ relative to activities and
>actors. We would then need another term for the material arrangements,
>themselves mainly the products of other activities (and so with histories
>linked to wider histories), which are more stable or invariant across
>activities 'within' them. This is something like the place/space
>distinction I refered to earlier. And it gets us closer to the complexity
>of the intertwined histories of (a) activities in spaces, which
>co-constitute them as places, and (b) activities that make and change
>spaces, under the guise of _their_ places. As Yrjo notes, activities (a)
>and (b) certainly overlap, and both contribute to longer-term eco-social
>processes whose trajectories give the historical dimension.
>
>Perhaps it is useful to think about settings as a means of articulation
>between different activities that (a) occur within them and (b) that affect
>them, linking materially across the different time scales involved.

I'm not sure I disagree with any of this, but limiting the focus to (a)
activities in spaces and (b) activities that make and change spaces --
doesn't seem sufficient. It seems to imply that the borders of the
grocery store can be taken as givens and that we can then talk about what
happens within them and about the material-semiotic construction of their
contents. But I wonder from whose standpoint (to borrow Dorothy Smith's
notion) this definition of "place" is useful? The supermarket is not a
naturally occuring place, but one constructed by powerful corporations
(powerful in part by virtue of their ability to produce certain kinds of
space) who consciously developed it to supplant other spatializations of
provisioning (e.g., the small neighborhood grocery), and who define its
borders according to certain commercial logics. I wonder if in treating
the grocery store as an "objective" space and focusing on how people within
it use and make it meaningful, we are not adopting the standpoint of the
corporation; defining activity in terms of the frame imposed by the
corporation (not necessarily, I suppose -- de Certeau, who works the
space/place distinction in a similar fashion, emphasizes the potential for
people to creatively subvert and resist the corporate strategies of space
in transitory, tactical ways; but his vision is rather bleak: for him,
marginality has become a pervasive way of life, and we are all "poachers"
on the landscapes of power). Rather than settings, perhaps it would be
more useful to think in terms of points of entry into networks of social
relations.

What's missing for me are the gender dynamics that distribute
responsibilities for "provisioning," that organize the display of goods
for those with "normal" bodies; the social practices that determine which
supermarkets (and more importantly, which kinds of supermarkets) are
situated in a given neighborhood, etc.

Jan Nespor
Department of Teaching and Learning
War Memorial Hall 305
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0313
nespor who-is-at vt.edu
phone: 540-231-8327
fax: 540-231-9075