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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

lived bodies « Previous | |Next »
January 23, 2004

The two weeks of being a tradesman engaged in upgrading the electronic cottage in the inner city has finally come to an end. Thank goodness.

I found the work tedious after a while, once the novelty wore off. Blogging here dropped off. I was just too tired in the evenings to think about the differences between place and space. It was too difficult to think--to organize my thoughts about the relationships between place, place and bodies at an abstract level.

Consequently, I lost the momentum in posting here about the lived body as a mediation between space and place; the role of the lived body in the constitution of place; or the momentum/movement of that body as the medium for providing access to the world.

However the labouring experience was illuminating. Through painting the electronic cottage for a couple of weeks I came to grasp how bodies inhabit a world, and how place is experienced by a lived body.

Upgrading the empty electronic cottage was a very physical time. I was on my hands and knees in an empty space scrubbing floors; climbing up and down ladders to clean and paint walls; I slowly became covered in paint as the day progressed; and then slowly delirious from the chemical and paint fumes. At the end of the day I was a wreck.

What I noticed was that the spatializing was done by the lived body. The body connected up the isolated positions within the room. It was the body that both exhibited expressive movement in the particular space, and oriented me in that space. Orientation here means a sense of fit and a knowing my way around.

Being in that space during the week of sprucing the electronic cottage up was a form of inhabitation; an active indwelling. This indwelling was different mode of dwelling from my living there. It was a plac of things-to-be-done rather than it being a space of just fitting into. I came into that place each morning with an indefinite horizon of possible action----what I could achieve that day. I had a knowledge of this place---of what needed to be done in this familar setting. I knew my way around in terms of what needed to be done.

Space becomes place.

I reckon I may take a break.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:25 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)
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