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Interrogating (Rural) Space Interrogating (Rural) Space with Michel de Certeau: with Michel de Certeau: Hybrid Epistemologies and Igniting the Cultural Turn esented by: Scott ring 2014

Conceptualizing Rurality with Michel de Certeau

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This SlideShare presentation contains a brief introduction to the ideas of Michael de Certeau and some possible avenues for reconnecting his work with the "cultural turn" in contemporary rural studies.

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Page 1: Conceptualizing Rurality with Michel de Certeau

Interrogating (Rural) SpaceInterrogating (Rural) Spacewith Michel de Certeau:with Michel de Certeau:

Hybrid Epistemologies andIgniting the Cultural Turn

Presented by: ScottSpring 2014

Page 2: Conceptualizing Rurality with Michel de Certeau

things to remember:

look at the cultural collage that exists in our modern city – a city that extends from our ‘utopian’ urban dream… now think about

what might lie beneath our ‘idyllic’ representations of

the contemporary countryside…

Let’s start with Michel de Certeau’s influential chapter…

“The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide— extremes of ambition and degradation,

brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday’s buildings, already transformed

into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, New York has never

learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in

the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future.” (p. 91)

An excerpt: the author writes about the hustle and bustle of the contemporary mega-city:

“Walking in the City”:

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Another excerpt: de Certeau writes that the city founded by utopian discourse and administered by the strucuralist organization repeatedly produces effects contrary to those at which it aims. These ‘waste products’ can perhaps be reintroduced into administrative curcuits but the profit system nevertheless generates a loss that is lived in space.

“…the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e., time), causes the condition of its own possibility—space itself—to be forgotten; space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which

the Concept-city functions; a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of

various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is

simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.” (p.95)

things to remember:

Interrogating this ‘blind spot’ helps us to not only understand how systems actually appropriate the

individual experience, but can reveal leverage points

for emergent strategies that seek reappropriation

and empowerment.

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One more excerpt: the author writes about the contradictory movements that take place in these “blind spots,” and how these movements overcome

the administrative organization. For me, it is a hopeful passage:

“…we have to acknowledge that if in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for

socioeconomic and political strategies, urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic

project excluded” … “the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power. The city becomes the

dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the

discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity

proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to

administer.” (p.95)

What about rural space? How is it becoming a landmark for socioeconomic and political strategy?

How is rural space represented by power structures and what does this mean about the importance of our own individual representations, experiences and opinions?

Page 5: Conceptualizing Rurality with Michel de Certeau

“Walking in the City”: So what does all of this mean?

“Walking in the City” is a chapter from Michel de Certeau’s “The Practise of Everyday Life” in which he articulates opportunities for ordinary people to

subvert and reappropriate the representations and rituals that structures of power seek to impose upon them.

He calls the use of these opportunities “tactics”. Tactics are used by individuals who are acting in environments that are governed by the “strategies” of

institutions and structures of power.

A popular example from “Walking in the City”: using a shortcut in the city is a “tactic” that undermines the strategic, mapped and intended

grid of the street.My example: utilizing public transportation and the grid of the city but

lying about status to obtain a cheaper fare.

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But why is thinking in terms of “tactics” and “strategies” important or useful?

“Given the interwovenness of domination and resistance, we must abandon the view that the space of resistance mirrors that of domination. Resistance

must be examined in its own terms rather than derived automatically from the nature and forms of domination.” (Ngai-Ling Sum, 2005)

Thinking in these terms can shed light on issues of agency and resistance. Although tactics cannot produce major structural change, they can provide the basis “for the emergence of social movements

that combine tactics with longer-range, more encompassing strategies” (Ngai-Ling Sum, 2005).

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What is the “Cultural Turn” and how can we ground Michel de Certeau’s “tactics” and “strategies” in current debates and relevant literature in the

context of rural studies?

The “cultural turn” can be used as an alternative approach to conceptualizing rurality. It reasserts the importance of space, and foregrounds “cultural

questions of meaning, identity, representation, difference and resistance in social science” (Cloke, 2006, 22).

If the “functional” and the “political-economic” conceptualizations of rurality prove to be inadequate on their own, what we might need is a theoretical

framing that involves social constructions of rurality;

“Regarding rurality as socially constructed suggests that the importance of the 'rural' lies in the fascinating world of social, cultural and moral values which have become associated with rurality, rural spaces and rural life.”

(Cloke, 2006, p.21)

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What is the “Cultural Turn” and how can we ground Michel de Certeau’s “tactics” and “strategies” in current debates and relevant literature in the

context of rural studies? (continued)

“…accounts both supportive of and critical of the cultural turn implicitly suggest that the cultural turn has principally been about cities—about re-imagining, re-

mapping and re-populating the urban”…“most studies inspired by the cultural turn have taken place quite deliberately outside the perceived intellectual boundaries of rural studies” (Cloke, 2006, 23-24). Rural studies can embrace the cultural turn

by reappropriating theory that has roots in utopian urban discussions.

It is crucial that we do qualitative research and theory that is implicated – directly, clearly, actively – in the wider politics of rural space. Unfortunately, “in many ways it

seems that rural policy and politics have been leading the academic community rather than the other way around” (Cloke, 2006, 25). We need to escape from traditional

epistemologies and move towards a dynamic reclamation of lost constitutive connections of politics and place.

Page 9: Conceptualizing Rurality with Michel de Certeau

“Ideas, representations or values which do not succeed in making their mark on space, and thus generating

(or producing) an appropriate morphology, will lose all pith and

become mere signs, resolve themselves into abstract descriptions,

or mutate into fantasies” (Lefebvre,1991 [1974], 416-417)

A starting point for solidarity, resistance, and social movements…

We need to understand resistance in the language of those who are resisting. We need to do strong

qualitative research that looks to understand the “tactics” of the

oppressed and recognizes the collage of individual experiences,

understandings, and representations that constitute rural space. We need conceptualizations that recognize the

extremes of ambition and degradation that not only exist in the

urban (see slide #2), but in the diverse, dynamic and increasingly

fragmented contemporary rural. We need to do action-research that aligns

the substance of everyday life with real avenues for change.

Action Research initiatives which concentrate on the ‘knowing how’ rather than on the ‘knowledge’ can help us to uncover how ideas, representations and values can more effectively make a mark on rural space.

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Thanks for reading! Happy researching! And PLEASE check out the cited authors for some good reads!

Academic Sources

Cloke, Paul. 2006. “Conceptualizing Rurality.” In Handbook of Rural Studies, edited byPaul Cloke, Terry Marsden, and Patrick Mooney, 18-28. London: Sage.

De Certeau. 1985. Practices of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lefebvre, H. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Oxford, Blackwell.

Sum, N-L. 2005. Towards a Cultural Political Economy: Discourses, Material Power and (Counter-) Hegemony. (Spot Paper). DEMOLOGOS.

Image Sourceshttp://www.stepbystep.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Difference-Between-Urban-and-Rural-Community1.jpghttp://www.ppt-backgrounds.net/travel/3691-newyork-city-skyline-backgrounds http://www.pptback.com/grass-tag.html http://lovelifeandsoul.com/things-to-keep-in-mind-while-working-on-a-private-blog-network/

*all emphasis is mine (except slide #8)