There is a comment made here in passing that is of interest. It says that the economic rationalists (neo-liberals) do not understand place. It is made in reference to an antagonism to the recent nation building a transcontinental railway from Adelaide to Darwin in order to develop these regions. Economic rationalists would close these depressed regions down and shift the population to Melbourne and Sydney where there is vibrant economic activity.
On this account the market dictates, and should dictate, where people live. It is irrational to think otherwise. So everything in the market is matter of simple location. Location or site for economic activity is an abstraction of the particular qualities of place----its colour, texture, climate, luminosity, smells, sounds, etc---that the functioning human body responds to.
What is denied here is the particularity of place. Place is irrelevant. There are just various sites or locations of economic activity. What is glossed over by neo-liberal or free market economics is the connection or nexus of bodies to spaces. it is bodies that engage in economic activity. And in the critical Hegelian Marxist tradition the emphasis was on process and becoming at the expense of spatiality. Geography did not really matter for the development of capital.
This misses the lived human experiences of place that gives rise to the attachment to a particular place. So people may decide to stay in a place such as South Australia, rather than shift to the global city of Sydney.
But bodies change the idea of space as relations built up from positions, since it is through our bodies that we experience particular regions and spaces as lived places. Body is the road to place as it orientates to, and inhabits, places. There is thus is an intimate bond between body and place. The intimate bond comes from the lived body in the physical world or landscape. We live in the landscape in a personal way of being.
How do lived body and lived place connect up? Through walking.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 18, 2004 04:48 PM | TrackBackWhere ever you go, there you are.
Posted by: charles on January 19, 2004 02:31 PM