118: Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that far from being a passive act, consumption, whether as use of an object or space, “ways of operating,” or art/ “ways of making” (combination, selection, cut-and-inversion), is a kind of spatial production.   

Building on (but rejecting) Foucault, Bourdieu, Kant, and others, de Certeau conceives of the physical world as divided into two classes: those with power and capital who are in control of space and production, and those with neither, but who exercise their agency by taking advantage of opportunities and consuming creatively.  The powerful side of things is also the scientific, the rational; this side creates static places of power, characterized by rational utopian uniformity, legibility, clarity, strategy, and centralized control.  The weak consumers take advantage of cracks in the rational system of these places; dependent on time, these peripatetic storytellers (walking and narration are inseparable) combine the fixed elements of the city/story with memories and inventions triggered by circumstance and audience to subvert the rational powers and create something new.

106: Neil Smith's American Empire

Neil Smith's American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization uses the life and career of Isaiah Bowman, geographer under FDR, to trace the interconnected histories of geography, the American Century, and globalization.  Explicitly critiquing the claim that American Empire, and the global capitalism it is attached to, are placeless or beyond the "end of geography," Smith argues that as the "territoriality of power," geography has been profoundly important to the construction of American Empire.  However, unlike European imperialisms,  American Empire proceeds by global economic expansion rather than in "geopolitical, territorial terms."  Thus, American Empire and geography are evolving together, as global economic expansion makes place ever more important.

American Empire proceeds both temporally and geographically.  Temporally, Smith identifies three nodes or "formative moments" in the US rise to globalism:

• WWI and Wilson's League of Nations; the US gets more ambitious than it had been in 1898, and dreams of continuing its imperial acquisitions; this dream is deferred
• WWII; by the end of the war, Henry Luce's 1941 claim that this was the "American Century" seemed to ring true; from 1945-1970s US capital and culture flourished and spread  
• Smashing the Berlin Wall/ sacking Baghdad in 1989/1991; after economic setbacks in the 1970s and 1980s from strengthening global competition, deregulation, the "withering" of the Japanese challenge in the 1990s, reconstruction of the US economy and the end of official communism all seemed to signify a "new world order," strengthened by a renewed interest in geography in the 1970s and 1980s.

103: David Livingstone's The Geographical Tradition

In The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise, David Livingstone uses an episodic structure both to trace the ideological and methodological history of the discipline and to map out the physical world as it looked through these various geographical perspectives.  He argues that geography changes as society changes, and that the best way to understand the discipline is to situate it in its social and intellectual environments.  A geographer and a historian of science, he takes a contextual approach to the history of geography, so he sees geographic knowledge as necessarily "partial," neither value-free nor complete; his emphasis on the "contested" nature of the discipline injects a much-needed dose of relativism and PoMo into geography.

Much of what Livingstone is doing is applying methods and concepts from the history of science to the history of geography, thus constructing the discipline as both science and contested cultural terrain.  He argues for a "situated geography" whose meaning, methods, and applications vary with time and place; historians can only access the discipline by studying its internal and

102: Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space

Lefebvre was one of the very first orals books I read.  My notes from a year ago: 

Henri Lefebvre’s vast, multifaceted The Production of Space could probably be said to advance any number of arguments, but I think his most compelling argument is the one that brings space and knowledge into a classical Marxist framework: capitalist Western society is moving from the production of things in space to the production of space itself, which means that capitalist powers are increasing their hold and surveillance on ordinary people (aka space is now shaping the working class).  However, all is not lost: no matter how much they try, the people who build and shape “dominant” space and employ the working class can’t squeeze the working class out of existence or keep them from “appropriating” and shaping space to suit their own needs, nor can they make the world a completely visual, timeless, ideological construct.  Regular people have bodies, and we live in specific places at specific historical moments, and we shape those places (yeah, I said places, not spaces) into unique, historical “works of art” that contrast with the partially commodified built environment constructed by the ruling class.  To say that capitalism has moved beyond the product to space itself is to argue for both an increasing attempt at totalizing control of society through space AND increased resistance from the people who live in, experience, and shape that space – with the potential for a socialist revolution where appropriated spaces based on the human body/lived experience and use-value take precedence over dominant, visual spaces and exchange-value.

101: David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity

David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity both updates and spatializes classical Marxist theory and situates studies of place within the context of post-1973 global capitalism.  He argues that postmodernity is a historical-geographical condition that is an aesthetic response to the crisis of overaccumulation.  Throughout, he emphasizes the continuity from modernity to postmodernity, the connection between new cultural and economic practices, the post-1973 development of flexible capital accumulation on a global scale, and new ways of thinking about time-space compression.  Some of his main points:

• modernity was at once transient, fleeting, contingent AND eternal and immutable; the project of Modernism was effectively the last hurrah of the Enlightenment project: to create a scientific narrative of chaos that could both rationalize internal social fragmentation within a narrative of Progress AND break from the past
• Postmodernism, on the other hand, celebrates difference, fragmentation, and the vernacular; it is spatial and pragmatic rather than temporal and abstract, and it revels in chaos and complexity.  As opposed to the Modernist city, the PoMo city is not divided into functional zones but instead develops by its own logic into something apolitically beautiful in its chaos.
• Both Modernism and Postmodernism are dialectically related to their particular "regime of accumulation," the particular configuration of capitalists, workers, state employees, financiers, and other political-economic agents that stabilizes the net product between consumption and accumulation.  In the first half of the 20th century, Fordism kept the regime of accumulation stable by slowly shaping global mass-production and mass-consumption into a core/periphery model with the US in the center.  

100: James Duncan's Superorganic

In "The Superorganic in American Cultural Geography," James Duncan calls out cultural geography for laboring under an outdated and undertheorized concept of culture, and argues that cultural geographers and social geographers would both benefit from interconnections between their disciplines.

According to Duncan, cultural geographers in the 1970s (the essay was published in 1980) were largely still working from Carl Sauer's "superorganic" theory of culture in his 1925 essay "The Morphology of Landscape."  Building on the work of Berkeley anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie, Sauer theorized culture to be both autonomous and the determinant of individual human action.  This separation of the individual from culture causes several problems for cultural geographers because

99: Domosh & Seager's Putting Women in Place

In Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, Mona Domosh and Joni Seager show that space and place are both gendered and integral to the construction of gender.  In providing an overview of feminist geographical scholarship (up to 2001), they argue that this gendering has historically (and is currently) integral to processes of segregation, dominance, and resistance, in places like work and home as well as in the actions of everyday life.  Further, they situate this discussion of gender and geography within both local urban historical geographies in Western Europe and the US AND a structural analysis of global gender issues.  Their book is divided into six parts:

Home: history and analysis of a space almost universally associated with women.  Focusing on England and the US form the 17th century on, they show how the emerging capitalist system separated the male world of production from the female world of reproduction, from the Victorian cult of domesticity to mid-century suburbia.  They then interrogate the raced and classed connections between notions of domesticity and turn-of-the-century social engineering projects aimed at "Americanizing" urban working-class and immigrant women and rural Native American women.

98: Adams, Hoelscher & Till's Textures of Place

Adams, Hoelscher, and Till's Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies originated in a 1998 special session celebrating Tuan's retirement and critiquing and updating his work; the essays include students of Tuan's, later geographers, and people who aren't geographers at all but who appreciate his work.  In their intro, the editors revise and add to humanist geography's subjective conception of place by

• setting up a dialectic between physical places and human experience of/ apprehension of/ construction of places
• rejecting the search for universal understandings of place (a la Tuan) in favor of multiple meanings shaped by both individual subjectivities and social differences, including race, class, gender, and sexuality
• putting places in social, geographical, and historical context