Geographies of Writing

Inhabiting Places and Encountering DifferenceBy Nedra Reynolds

Southern Illinois University Press

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

Contents

List of Figures.............................................................................ixAcknowledgments.............................................................................xiIntroduction................................................................................11. Between Metaphor and Materiality.........................................................112. Reading Landscapes and Walking the Streets: Geography and the Visual.....................473. Maps of the Everyday: Habitual Pathways and Contested Places.............................784. Streetwork: Seeing Difference Geographically.............................................1105. Learning to Dwell: Inhabiting Spaces and Discourses......................................139Notes.......................................................................................181Works Cited.................................................................................189Index.......................................................................................199

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 act of 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"...