Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this essay I discuss the complex and evolving situation at La Frontera, the US – Mexico border. I do so in light of my current research on the intervention of edges in human experiences. In that research, I distinguish several basic types of edge, such as rims, frames, and margins. Two of these types are of particular relevance to the circumstance at La Frontera: borders and boundaries. I identify certain primary differences between these two kinds of edge in order to illuminate the earlier history of La Frontera as well as what is now happening at this vexed site. I take up issues of mapping the border, the nature of the borderline, borderlands, and especially the presence of the massive wall that has been constructed along considerable portions of La Frontera. Implications for basic issues of being versus becoming in matters of society and space conclude the piece.

This paper reviews existing academic interpretations of ‘urban exploration’ and argues that focus to date on identifying and celebrating the transgressive and/or emancipatory dimension of this practice has failed to account for the taxonomic and survey-related orientation evident in the author's study of accounts of exploration of Cold War bunkers posted on urban exploration Internet forums. The author's study suggests that the survey and veneration of place evident in these accounts may be a more significant motivation for urban exploration as practised than psychogeographical revere and/or transgressive incursion into space and place.

This paper proposes an analytic attention to the charged atmospheres of everyday life. It asks how circulating forces are generated as atmospheres per se, how they spawn worlds, animate forms of attachment and detachment, and become the live background of living in and living through things. Writing through several small cases selected out of countless potentially describable moments and scenes in which the sense of something happening becomes tactile, I try to open a proliferative list of questions about how forces come to reside in experiences, conditions, things, dreams, landscapes, imaginaries, and lived sensory moments. How do people dwelling in them become attuned to the sense of something coming into existence or something waning, sagging, dissipating, enduring, or resonating with what is lost or promising? I suggest that atmospheric attunements are palpable and sensory yet imaginary and uncontained, material yet abstract. They have rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, and lifespans. They can pull the senses into alert or incite distraction or denial.

A simple journey through a fog-bound shoreline. This paper reflects on such a journey to investigate the relationship between aerial space and the elemental relational materialism produced by fog. It takes the experience of fog as its conceptual pivot, using this ‘indexing’ of air to argue for a reconsideration of the visual mechanisms of aerial space. As a phenomenon, the presence of fog generates a variety of distillations: tellingly, for this paper, it confiscates the horizon on a temporary basis, forestalling the perception of this visible line or ground of calibration. It is the loss of perceivable distance through the opacity of fog that strands us in the momentary instant of disorientation. The initial experience of disorientation is, however, set within a more complex agenda that acknowledges the connective potential of fog to deepen the relationship between vision, distance, and embodied immersion in aerial space. In particular, I address Casey's work on the incoming power of place and the outgoing function of the body to argue that fog acts as a gathering-force, intensifying the immanent entanglements of body with world.

Literary writing has operated as a space of inquiry unsettling the literal and figurative ground on which thinking takes place. From Hölderlin's invocations to the ether, to Walter Benjamin's characterization of Baudelaire's poetry as unfathomable, a certain tradition of writing, particularly in German letters, takes shape around a critique of gravity. Against the background of a geopoetics, I propose to turn to the question of an inconstant and inconsistent ground in Paul Celan's ‘geological lyric’ by explicating the relationship in his writing between the earth and its unthought other: air. This reading has as its object of inquiry what I am calling Celan's aerography, which is doubly articulated in the turn to aerial space in his poetry and in his articulation of the work of air in those terrestrial landscapes formed and deformed by aeolian processes. I argue that the radically dissipative geographies evoked in his poems could extend critical geographic inquiry into a multiple and turbulent materiality; however, the sheer spectrality of the material world in Celan's poetry seems to require an (a)material criticism, that is, a materiality without matter.

This paper explores the topic of ‘haunted sound’ and its overarching significance within minimalist thought, tracing the vast intricacies of this aerial intimation as a new and unforeseen existential horizon. To this end, the paper advances via the entangling concepts of nothingness and movement, including subthematic dimensions as far-reaching as: the zero-degree, disintegration, control/noncontrol, mood, catastrophe, indeterminacy, interruption, repetition, desertion, indifference, stillness, and exhaustion. It is through the formulation of this haunted soundscape, in turn, that the once absolute totalities of consciousness stray toward an increasingly apparitional province, turning perception itself toward the paradoxical borderlands of presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, being and nonbeing. Ultimately, the intent of this project is to devise an innovative outlook on the singular potential of sound to eclipse past existential regimes, to lead the aesthetic toward a vanishing, phantasmatic sphere at once creative and destructive, ethereal yet incisive, and which thereby restores the artwork to its volatile capacity for engaging the chaos of a minimalist imagination.

‘Aerography’ is an imagined scholarly discipline that is intended to raise questions concerning ‘unthought elemental and metaphysical assumptions in recent human geographies’. How, for example, would unexamined contemporary disciplinary assumptions change if geography were less ostensibly geocentric and more focused on the space of the aerosphere? This is an aerography of the role of aether and theater in the transformation of landscape's meaning away from that of an earthly polity and its place to that of a natural scenic space, helping to pave the way for geography conceptualized as spatial science.

In this paper I argue that geography, contagion, and the element of air have historically overlapped in interesting ways and that they continue to do so. By tracing metaphors of air, wind, miasma, and contagion through literary works that span nearly three centuries, I argue that the element of air tends to signify, in cultural expression, a more ambiguous, affective form of contagion that is also bound up with the spread of ideas and information.