Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference

by Nedra Reynolds

Overview

Twenty-first-century technological innovations have revolutionized the way we experience space, causing an increased sense of fragmentation, danger, and placelessness. In Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference, Nedra Reynolds addresses these problems in the context of higher education, arguing that theories of writing and rhetoric must engage the metaphorical implications of place without ignoring materiality.

Geographies of Writing makes three closely related contributions: one theoretical, to reimagine composing as spatial, material, and visual; one political, to understand the sociospatial construction of difference; and one pedagogical, to teach writing as a set of spatial practices. Aided by seven maps and illustrations that reinforce the book’s visual rhetoric, Geographies of Writing shows how composition tasks and electronic space function as conduits for navigating reality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809325603
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	12/28/2003
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1460L (what's this?)

About the Author

Nedra Reynolds is a professor of writing and rhetoric and the director of the College Writing Program at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Portfolio Keeping: A Guide for Students and Portfolio Teaching: A Guide for Instructors and a coeditor of The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing, sixth edition.

Read an Excerpt

Geographies of Writing

Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference

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By Nedra Reynolds

Southern Illinois University Press

Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8093-2787-4

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Chapter One

Between Metaphor and Materiality

Spatial metaphors are problematic in so far as they presume that space is not. -Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, "Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics"

What do bodies, city walls, pathways, streams, or plane trees have to do with rhetoric, writing, or an intellectual discussion? Plato opens the Phaedrus with attention to place because the context has everything to do with where Socrates and Phaedrus are located, both in a physical place and in relation to each other. While race, class, and gender have long been viewed as the most significant markers of identity, geographic identity is often ignored or taken for granted. However, identities take root from particular sociogeographical intersections, reflecting where a person comes from and, to some extent, directing where she is allowed to go. Geographical locations influence our habits, speech patterns, style, and values-all of which make it a rhetorical concept or important to rhetoric. For writers, location is an actof inhabiting one's words; location is a struggle as well as a place, an act of coming into being and taking responsibility.

This was Adrienne Rich's point in a well-known essay from 1984, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location," one that marks a great deal of interest in positionality and discursive authority, especially among feminist theorists. Rich wants to resist the abstractions of theory and invite "a struggle for accountability" that begins with the body, "the geography closest in" (212). Rich defines her struggle as "locating the grounds from which to speak with authority as women. Not to transcend this body, but to reclaim it.... Begin, we said, with the material" (213).

To begin with the material means grounding an inquiry into taken-for-granted spatial metaphors and geographical practices that affect reading and writing, living and learning. An inquiry into these metaphors and practices, into place and space broadly speaking and very specifically, can offer insights into the connections between locatedness and moving through the world; between travel and dwelling; between public and private. In such betweens is where this project resides, raising questions about the sociospatial production of culture and identities, and about the everyday production and uses of space. How do we read the signs about places that tell us to come on in or to keep out? How might theories of territoriality interact with theories of movement to change our notions of place and space? How can cultural and feminist geography contribute to material theories of rhetoric or discourse?

Composition studies-those who read and write its discourses and construct its spaces for learning-has not, typically, begun with the material but instead has been drawn to the metaphorical and the imaginary, particularly evident in language about texts and textual production. In "The Limits of Containment," Darsie Bowden traces and analyzes the container metaphor in discourses about writing and the teaching of writing. I am interested in her analysis for the ways in which it indicates not only a view of "texts" and therefore composing but also a way of being in the world, one that has serious consequences for learning. In the model of containment, words in a text "become privatized ... and thus they are closed off from a public that is beyond the perimeter" (374). The public-private split, while illusory in several ways, is one of the most dominant paradigms about space in our culture, one that leads to notions of ownership: "my paper" becomes something fenced off, its contents private property. These "implied boundaries," as Bowden names them, explains the effectiveness of a rule-governed system for composing and students' reluctance to revise (375). In addition, "containerization limits the active participation of an audience, and hence, constantly risks being anti-rhetorical" (374). For those whose comfort zone lies within the parameters of titles with a colon and lengthy lists of works cited, the ambiguities of nonacademic discourse-lying outside fixed boundaries-are much more troubling. When a text is viewed as having an inside and an outside-with the audience, in particular, as a factor outside-writers can't think of texts in terms of movement or exchange.

As Bowden recognizes, container metaphors aren't easily hurdled or disposed of; in fact, because of their work as spatial metaphors, they can't be "overcome." Spatial metaphors are inseparable from and embedded in our language, especially our language about language; as a result, container metaphors for texts imply that there are visible boundaries to all discourse. One hears routinely, for example, the charge that someone's argument has "gone too far" or "doesn't go far enough." How far can discourse go before it goes too far? Where does the notion come from that arguments, analyses, discussions, or questions have spatial limits? Going too far is perceived to be overly analytical, too critical, almost disrespectful. But if no one ever went too far, logically or emotionally, whose minds would ever be changed? "Going too far" as well as the more recently popular "don't go there," stand for the ways in which spatial metaphors dominate our thinking about language and learning. This chapter attempts to analyze some of these spatial metaphors, especially the attraction to movement and the neglect of material space in many contemporary discourses. I argue that we need both movement and dwelling and that we must pay attention not only to borderlands but also to the places that borders surround.

Spatial Metaphors, Spatial Theory, and Thirdspace

Because space is so abstract and intangible, language to describe it tends towards the metaphorical and the narratable. Space is usually described or represented by making comparisons with familiar objects or ideas-like an academic discipline being called a field (giving it the boundaries of absolute space). Meant to familiarize, metaphoric representations "describe the remote in terms of the immediate, the exotic in terms of the domestic, the abstract in terms of the concrete, and the complex in terms of the simple" (J. Smith 12). As rhetorical theorists understand from Nietzsche's lecture "On Truth and Lies in Nonmoral Sense," spatial metaphors, like the language of truths, become familiar through common usage or repetition. After long usage, as Nietzsche says, "the movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms" that make up "truth" become "fixed, canonical, and binding" (1174): "Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained on sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing" (1174). Worn-out coins become mere metal, their worth lost; similarly, well-used spatial metaphors lose their connection to anything "real."

They did have that connection once, however, or the metaphor would not have evolved. Here's one social researcher on the rise of spatial metaphors in sociological theory: "One major feature of spatial metaphors is simply that they do ultimately allude to some concrete, material 'reality,' be it ordinary physical space or commonsensical understandings of social proximity or distance between individuals" (Silber 346). Spatial metaphors come from somewhere, in other words, and they then go on to influence our responses to other places; they are formed through the material world and the ways in which people experience space and place. Because they do come out of the everyday to begin with, it's even more striking that once the spatial metaphors become commonplace or well known (that of sociology or composition studies as "fields"), their connection to the real is elided even though they can shape theory and research (Silber 324). For example, do we really think of plowed earth, fertility, or crop yield when we call composition a field? Once composition could be named a field, a concept reflecting absolute space, then it could wield power (Smith and Katz 75-76).

What spatial metaphors and conceptions of space tend to ignore are the ways in which people move through the world, or the spatial practices that shape lifeworlds. It is not only places and their built-in constraints that determine certain practices, which then become habitual or taken for granted, but also the adjustments and compromises, the shifts and turns in the process of accommodating to a place. For example, a composition instructor assigned to a tiered lecture hall with bolted-down seats is upset by the room assignment; she must make contortionist changes to the collaborative group practices of the class. However, at some point in the semester, the configurations become so routine that the room assignment is no longer an issue-everyone adapts. Once constraints become familiar-whether they are the desktop of a computer interface or the furniture arrangement of a classroom-they become encoded and thus rarely noticed or questioned. The daily routine elides the process of adapting, and the ideology of transparent space takes over-the idea that space doesn't matter. Spatial practices, therefore, evolve from movements or placements that we take for granted, or boundaries that seem clear or uncontested, and they develop into the habitual ways we move through the world.

Despite the pull and the promise of the imaginary, the spaces of the everyday demand equal, urgent attention. Metaphor and material are often divided to make it easier to discuss or distinguish them, but their combination and interaction creates social space, Henri LeFebvre's term, which refers to the ways in which space is "used," produced and reproduced, and how space participates in forms of production.

Published in France in 1974, but not translated into English until 1991, LeFebvre's The Production of Space is one of the most important theoretical works on space of the twentieth century. Politically Marxist and stylistically dense, it takes as its project the rejection of notions of space as a container, as abstract, or as independent of agency. Interested in how space affects and is affected by production, and working within the traditions of philosophy and political economy, LeFebvre attempts to develop "a science of space" that unifies a conceptual triad and that theorizes space as a social product, typically concealed by different types of illusions (27-30). The conceptual triad for which LeFebvre's work is best known constitutes three ways in which space is used, produced, reproduced:

Spatial Practice (perceived)

Representations of Space (conceived)

Representational Spaces (lived)

Spatial practice is perceived space, which "embraces ... the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation" (33). Perceived space, in simple terms, is what we see or smell or otherwise register with our senses; it is the material expression of social relations in space. Spatial practice "has a certain cohesiveness, but this does not imply that it is coherent" (38). Spatial practice both produces and appropriates society's space and "embodies a close association" between one's daily routine and the routes or networks set up to link work, leisure, and private life (38). Representations of Space, or conceived space, are tied "to knowledge, to signs, to codes": think of maps or signs or canons. The dominant space in any society, this conceptualized space takes form through verbal signs and codes; think of "the space of scientists, planners, urbanists" (38). Conceived space is made up of conceptual abstractions like geometry that may in fact inform the actual configuration of spatial practices. This second formation makes the rules for spaces; representations of space "are certainly abstract, but they also play a part in social and political practice" (41). Thirdly, Representational Spaces are the lived spaces of inhabitants and users: "This is the dominated-and hence passively experienced-space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate" (39). Representational spaces are linked to "the underground side of social life" and may or may not be coded. More connaissance than savoir, representational spaces overlay physical space but need not obey any rules of consistency or cohesiveness (41). Lived space has its source in history and is "alive: it speaks. It has an affective kernel or center: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or: square, church, graveyard" (42).

Particularly important to LeFebvre's theory is the idea that space is active, not a passive surface; in fact, "space is itself actively produced as part of capitalist accumulation strategies" (Merrifield, "Henri LeFebvre," 172). LeFebvre's triad also loses its force, Merrifield claims, "if it gets treated merely in the abstract: it needs to be embodied with actual flesh and blood and culture, with real life relationships and events" ("Henri LeFebvre," 175). LeFebvre makes this point himself-that the perceived-conceived-lived triad "loses all force if it is treated as an abstract 'model'" (40). To counteract this tendency toward abstraction, LeFebvre offers the body to help illustrate the three moments of social space. The three realms, like the various parts of a human body, are interconnected so that a subject can move from one to another without confusion-"a logical necessity" (40). LeFebvre's use of the body is an important one for rhetoric and rhetorical theory; it emphasizes the "embodiment" of the production of space, or how space cannot be studied in material ways without accounting for physical bodies, something I take up again in other chapters.

One brief illustration of how these three parts of the triad work in unison can be found in universities and their production of space. The educational mission of universities (conceived space) may conceal from us their status as actual workplaces (perceived space), and the two together combine in lived space: a university is a place where an internationally renowned researcher can't find a parking place. Cultural geography and postmodern spatial theory insist that there are no "pure" spaces and that space functions in indivisible and entangled ways: as perceived, conceived, and lived space. Understanding sociospatiality means attending to this trialectics of spatiality, present in all forms of the social production of place and space, and not just where there is remarkable difference.

Trying to keep the three points of the triad straight is not as important, as least for my argument, as is maintaining a sense of their interlocked relation. The three concepts cannot be separated, a point well illustrated by Edward W. Soja in his book Thirdspace, which continues the project of theorizing space as a product of human practice. A tribute to and an engagement with LeFebvre, Thirdspace represents "the trialectics of spatiality" in a swirl, not as a chart or graph or map, and outlines not the difference that geography makes but the geography that difference makes (see fig. 1.1). While he would insist on the dialectical relationship between space and time, Soja wants a "trialectics," where the spatial and temporal are joined by the social. In a trialectics of spatiality, then, there is one blended, swirling concern with how space is lived, perceived, and conceived.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Geographies of Writing by Nedra Reynolds Copyright © 2004 by Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Figures....................ix
Acknowledgments....................xi
Introduction....................1
1. Between Metaphor and Materiality....................11
2. Reading Landscapes and Walking the Streets: Geography and the Visual....................47
3. Maps of the Everyday: Habitual Pathways and Contested Places....................78
4. Streetwork: Seeing Difference Geographically....................110
5. Learning to Dwell: Inhabiting Spaces and Discourses....................139
Notes....................181
Works Cited....................189
Index....................199

Editorial Reviews

“The scholarship is superb. It will bring into composition a new affiliated field and open new lines of inquiry. The field of rhetoric and composition had been waiting for what Reynolds would do next with geography, and Geographies of Writing is it.”—John Trimbur, editor of Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics

From the Publisher