Tuesday, January 3, 2012

On The Placelessness of The Prescribed Environment. Part One: Foundations


This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for Unnecessarily Dense Academic Discourses Monthly, which is not a real publication; although I may have enough content on this blog alone to populate the first few issues (appropriately padded with full page Zoloft ads of course).

Serialized into three installments.

01 Foundations- Musing on the axiom that ‘Place’ and ‘Space’ are intermittently convergent terms through both productive and erroneous interdisciplinary translations, feedback, and interbreeding [not an a priori assessment, but an academically defendable one] a concern for the built environments that those like myself propagate tints and compounds. Geographer Edward Relph submits that ‘space’ is less a Cartesian container giving the character of shape to ‘place’ as it is a phenomenological dimension of the latter term- A tangible understanding of emotional and intellectual experience. While the professional disposition of those like myself, through self preservation perhaps, won’t allow for the complete dissolution of the container’s hegemony, this space-place relationship is unavoidable, both academically and colloquially.




In the same discourse, Relph later suggests that place [and, as ascertained above, space] may be experienced authentically as a “Direct and genuine experience of the entire complex of the identity of places” or inauthentically via unrestricted acceptance of mass values and the resultant eradication of the distinct. This is where our concern here lies, for surely the domain of the image [the domain of those like me], both produced and resultant, is an agent of monotony and, as conjectured following, an operative dissolving not only authenticity, but sobriety, ethics, and even free intellect.