From 8fabba3f786b8557d1ffc85af4f9ea2a93e3288e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: demet RENDERING
- How, then, might the effect of interferences be marked while accounting for the apparatus of their production? In other words, how might knowledge generated through everyday spatial practices be rendered without being flattened, georeferenced, or vectorized? This page is an account of the form and formation of negative-spaces––the website which marks the effects of my deep mapping practice and constitutes the contents of what I will submit as my master's thesis in geography. In what follows, I articulate how making space for deep mapping renders theory as praxis. In doing so, I attend to the exclusions entailed in defining the form of my research output and rendering it intelligible to the sociotechnical system of institutional graduate publishing. The archival of negative-spaces within UBC's institutional repository will performatively render my research-creation output legible as an MA thesis.
+ How, then, might the effect of interferences be marked while accounting for the apparatus of their production? In other words, how might knowledge generated through everyday spatial practices be rendered without being flattened, georeferenced, or vectorized? This page is an account of the form and formation of negative-spaces––the website which marks the effects of my deep mapping practice and constitutes the contents of what I will submit as my master's thesis in geography. In what follows, I articulate how making space for deep mapping renders theory as praxis. In doing so, I attend to the exclusions entailed in defining the form of my research output and rendering it intelligible to the sociotechnical system of institutional graduate publishing. The archival of negative-spaces within UBC's institutional repository will performatively render my research-creation output legible as an MA thesis.
- Like transgression, interference at once articulates difference and effects the reconfiguration of boundaries by bringing what was previously unintelligible into focus. Interference is the superposition of different intelligibilities. The effects of interference, of 'differential intra-actions' (Barad 2007), are marked by diffraction patterns. As clarified in negative-spaces/interference.html, "A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear" (Haraway 1991, 70). Just as the difference between human and nonhuman, field and researcher do not preexist the boundary making practices by which they are rendered differentially intelligible, the boundary differentiating negative space from an intelligible form does not preexist interference but rather is illuminated as its effect. Interference, like
+ Like transgression, interference at once articulates difference and effects the reconfiguration of boundaries by bringing what was previously unintelligible into focus. The effects of interference, of 'differential intra-actions' (Barad 2007), are marked by diffraction patterns. As clarified in negative-spaces/interference.html, "A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear" (Haraway 1991, 70). Just as the difference between human and nonhuman, field and researcher do not preexist the boundary making practices by which they are rendered differentially intelligible, the boundary differentiating negative space from an intelligible form does not preexist interference but rather is illuminated as its effect. Interference, like
+
Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust. Perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation…. (Foucault 1977, 35)
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The boundary of an intelligible form is rendered articulate only in its crossing. Indeed, "it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses" (Foucault 1977, 34). Because intelligibility is provisionally figured, what constitutes negative space is continuously shifting. No predetermined set of method(s) for interference will do. As an interference praxis, deep mapping relies on tactics rather than strategies. Whereas the system in authority deploys strategy to delimit and maintain the place of its positioning, "a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other" (de Certeau 1984, 36-37). Operating from within negative spaces, "...a tactic boldly juxtaposes diverse elements in order suddenly to produce a flash shedding a different light on the language of a place…" (de Certeau 1984, 37-38).
Intelligibility is not a static state but the effect of boundary drawing practices; what constitutes negative space is therefore provisional, continuously figured and refigured in relation to the intelligible form. Writes Barad, "Boundary transgressions should be equated not with the dissolution of traversed boundaries (as some authors have suggested) but with the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries" (Barad 2007, 245) About negative space - being there - its all the field - boundary re/figurations rather than dissolution de certeau "It is as though delimitation itself were the bridge that opens the inside to its other"
- Locating my thesis in negative-spaces brings to the fore forms of knowledge production and rendering spatial research public that are institutionally rendered outside the norm. And, in doing so, negative-spaces enacts an interference which redraws the definition of possibility. It's not one against another (opposition) but a Baradian 'intra-action' (Barad 2007) which reveals the limit through the transgressive act of proposing alternative framings. This is the work of reconfiguring boundaries. It is to the configuration and configured form of my thesis that I now turn.
+
+ Intelligibility is not a static state but the effect of boundary drawing practices; what constitutes negative space is therefore provisional, continuously figured and refigured in relation to the intelligible form. Just as "The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess" (Foucault 1977, 34), so do negative space and the intelligible form. Tactics are acts/instruments of interference which don't simply "juxtapose[] diverse elements" but superposition different intelligibilities––i.e., bring what was rendered unintelligible from negative space into that of the intelligible form. Such interference effects the articulation and reconfiguration of limits/boundaries. Writes Barad (2007), "Boundary transgressions should be equated not with the dissolution of traversed boundaries (as some authors have suggested) but with the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries" (245). Locating my thesis in negative-spaces brings to the fore forms of knowledge production and rendering spatial research public that are institutionally rendered outside the norm. And, in doing so, negative-spaces enacts an interference which redraws the definition of possibility. It's not one against another (opposition) but a Baradian 'intra-action' which reveals the limit through the transgressive act of proposing alternative framings. This is the work of reconfiguring boundaries. It is to the configuration and configured form of my thesis that I now turn.
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