Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In recent years, local participation has come increasingly to the forefront of the strategies, language, and practices adopted by conservation organisations in the United Kingdom. In this paper I explore what impact the process of participation is having in reshaping conceptions of conservation and the countryside. Based on empirical research in Southeast England, I argue that participation may reveal a new, but contradictory, arena of conservation concern centred on the relevance of place. In laying claim to its own knowledge, language, and values, this concern for place provides a legitimate authority for local people to challenge outside representations of their space. As a result, I suggest that the practice of participation may be bringing about a retreat from the national vision of traditional conservation and a fragmentation of conservation ideas.

Three images of ocean space are becoming increasingly prevalent in policy and planning circles and popular culture: The image of the ocean as an empty void to be annihilated by hypermobile capital; as a resource-rich but fragile space requiring rational management for sustainable development; and as a source of consumable spectacles. In this paper I locate the emergence of these three apparently contradictory images of the ocean within structural contradictions in the spatiality of capitalism, which, in turn, are precipitating a crisis in marine regulation. To analyze these contradictions, I begin with a historical study of industrial-era marine uses, regulations, and representations. This is followed by an analysis of the present crisis and its associated representational discourses. I conclude with a call for analyses of ocean space that probe beneath marine imagery so as to explore the regulatory crises and social conflicts that underlie marine-policy debates and that reveal the ocean's potential as a site of social transformation.

In the wake of claims that much of critical human geography has succumbed to the dreaded postmodern fatigue syndrome—symptoms include unrelenting tiredness, uncritical social somnambulance, spectral hallucinations, an unnatural preoccupation with the dead, and a tendency to submit to passive and reactive forces—the authors offer a paper that came to them during a dream dreamt alongside insomnia. Borne of exhaustion rather than tiredness, the dream-work lends consistency to a host of fragments drawn from the milieux of spatial science, political economy, poststructuralist philosophy, postmodern sociology, twentieth-century literature, and popular culture. As a work composed in the dead of night, the authors follow Deleuze and Foucault in affirming not the omniscient light of Bentham's generalised, ‘all-seeing’ Panopticon, but the ‘dark light’ of the blind power lurking in the shadowy world of the Dark Panopticon. Surprisingly, the exemplary mise-en-scéne for the resulting foray into the Heart of Darkness turns out to be the greengrocery that is invariably situated at the gateway to every supermarket and hypermarket. It is here that the authors sense the unbearable violence perpetrated against the flesh of the world—the flesh of soft fruit and animals, no less than the flesh of ourselves and the earth—and it is from here that the revenge of the zombie flesh takes hold (fetishistic depersonalisation and deindividuation), The authors argue that the human being is suspended, undone, and disseminated between the information society and the consumer society. Only our ‘en-trails’ are left amidst the flesh of the world. This undead dreamworld is less Orwellian than Kafkaesque: infinite suspense and perpetual regret.

In this paper I seek to examine a set of tactile, habitually grounded, bodily modes of perception which lie at the centre of Walter Benjamin's analysis of urban experience under modernity. On first reading of Benjamin's later writings, particularly his various interpretations of Baudelaire, these tactile, distracted modes of perception appear to represent a profound experiential entropy; a dilution of real affective experience which Benjamin sees as defining modernity, However, it is possible to trace the outline of a richer and more far-reaching phenomenology of perception within Benjamin's thought. This is what I seek to do. In seeking to trace out this phenomenology I argue that although such tactile, distracted, habitually grounded modes of perception are intertwined in an economy of self-defence, they also contain within them a whole range of capacities for knowing and getting hold of the urban, Following the lead of earlier interpreters of Benjamin such as Marleen Stoessel, Miriam Hansen, and Jürgen Habermas I also argue that these modes of perception stand in a particular relationship to the ‘auratic’. In exploring this relationship Benjamin outlines a novel theory of intersubjectivity between humans and the nonhuman. This clement of the intersubjective is not only important in understanding Benjamin's work, it also suggests a range of productive avenues for enframing an ethics of encounter within the contemporary city.

The reputed ‘difficulty’ of the texts of Gayatri Spivak poses an obstacle to potentially productive reflection on, and debate surrounding, her critical positions and analyses. Motivated by the attempt to address this situation, I offer this discussion as an exegetical account of some of Spivak's principle categories and arguments. I demonstrate how certain themes, such as the aporia, catachresis, subalternity, and the relationship between the narrow and the general, function in Spivak's work as signposts en route to her formulation of postcolonialism as a deconstructive scenario. Crucial to this formulation is a type of political economy of intellectual production and academic work and the situating of the latter with respect to the international division of labour, informed by a Marxian critique of capital and, in particular, Marx's concept of value. Spivak demonstrates, via Marx, that an economic logic underwrites the practice of representation, in general, and, hence, all intellectual and academic work, in particular. Ironically, Spivak's idiosyncrasy with respect to the mobilisation of Marx in her work, and one of the reasons for her perceived difficulty, lies in the unexpectedness of her orthodoxy.