André Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist (eds.) 2009. Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. 356 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7546-7461-0.
Reviewed by Peter Lugosi, School of Services Management, Bournemouth University (UK)
Jansson and Lagerkvist’s edited collection explores the processes through which spaces become uncertain, opaque…strange. At times these uncertainties emerge as negativities – fear, loss, exile, discomfort, but they may also be positive in the form of novelty, excitement, amusement and wonder. Some things are strange because they are new, and fall outside existing norms or even systems of classification, while others become strange as they become outdated, abandoned and increasingly obscure. Jansson and Lagerkvist’s text brings together concepts from geography, media and cultural studies in stressing how the immediacy and apparently straightforward nature of space inevitably obscures and excludes. Familiarity, therefore, cannot be disentangled from the strange; the ordinary exists alongside and in relation to the extraordinary. The various chapters in this book examine, through different contexts, the processes and agencies that produce, and, more importantly, mediate strangeness. A thread running through all the chapters is the importance of the media, mediation and representation in uniting the mundane with the fantastic, or the obvious with the obscure, thus normalising or extinguishing strangeness in the creation of effect or experience. However, the chapters also show how mediation can serve to delineate the deviant, the extraordinary, and the fantastic or highlight the strangeness of those things that are somehow vague. The authors demonstrate how strangeness emerges through changing relationships of power in which it is experienced differently by various people, at different times, and how strangeness is absorbed into cultures and societies.
[cc image credit: Joseph Robertson]
The book is split into three sections: part 1 examines the different scales at which opacity emerges and how mediation influences the manifestation of strangeness. In the opening chapter Carney and Miller wrestle with notions of vagueness in general and with how vagueness emerges in urban contexts, before offering two specific forms of cultural practice that at once captures strangeness but can also be read as attempts to mobilise it. The first of these is early 20th century photography of derelict, marginal urban spaces, which presents possibilities for vagueness and strangeness to emerge in amongst, and in contrast to, the ordered sensibilities of cities. The second example offered by Carney and Miller is the Eruv, a process through which large urban and suburban areas are redefined by its Jewish residents as one enclosed space, thus allowing them to travel between premises and to transport objects without breaking the rules of the Sabbath. Both these examples of mediation and social practice offer different readings, interpretations and the possibility for alternative experiences of the spaces being represented, thus allowing socio-spatial practices to challenge or disrupt existing power relationships.
In the following chapter Löfgren changes the scale of analysis to the microcosm of the home and considers the fate of media objects and technologies, for example, photographs, cassettes, videos, records, CDs, reels of home movies, slides, computer games, consoles, diaries, drawings and media players. In their prime these objects amuse, enchant and capture moments in people’s life, but once they become redundant, they are hidden, and people attempt to dispose of these strange remnants from the past. While individuals retain, or recapture, a nostalgic connection with some objects, such as photo albums, diaries and video footage, they are estranged to many others. Löfgren narrates his own experiences and relationships with the dying and hidden objects that subsequently haunt him.
Ahrén and Sappol change scale again in focusing on representations and displays of the human body. The chapter takes the form of two dialogues by the authors who take turn to comment on the ways in which representations or displays of the body engage the viewer; how they can, in specific forms, appear to create an image of order and unity, while in others displaying its disordered, dysfunctional nature, but at all times transforming the body into an object of consumption. These processes of representation and display make a series of scientific truth claims, while at the same time reproducing power relationships, for example about the central status of the healthy male body ideal against which the strange other, the female or the sick, is imagined. However, these representations of the body also serve to highlight its strangeness – and, for the authors at least, they challenge the viewer to reflect on their sense of selves and embodied experiences of space. In the final chapter of Part 1, Parks considers an overlooked aspect of mediation and mediatisation, the satellite, which, in their various forms, transmit information around the world, while also casting a digital gaze back on the earth.
Part 2 of the book, entitled Dislocation, disruption and disobedience focuses on the various cultural practices and events that either challenge existing power relationships, or expose some deviant aspect of culture, and thus serve to challenge perceptions and experiences of space and notions of self. Habel examines the experiences of women at the 1897 Stockholm Exhibition and the ways in which various representations and mediations of those experiences shaped women’s engagement with the event. Lagerkvist draws on Lefebvre’s work on rhythms, which she uses in her analysis of representations of China and Shanghai’s past, as they are reconstructed, through the juxtapositioning of objects in a colonial building, the La Villa Rouge. Straw considers the role of 20th century crime novels and films in creating and reproducing particular representations of cities as criminal spaces and centres of deviance. A similar theme is explored by Wilbert and Hansen in their discussion of walking tours of London crime scenes. They focus on historical and contemporary representations of murder and the relationship visitors share with the spaces in which these events actually took place in London. More specifically they consider several walking tours of these city spaces and discuss how these strange, marginal spaces are performed by guides and visitors in relation to these representations of crime and criminality. Deviance of a different kind is the focus of Hammond’s chapter: she discusses the fate of a modern Spa complex built in the city of Bath in the UK. Hammond considers the ideologically loaded constructions of Bath as a historical city, which she uses to explain the negative reactions to the Spa.
Part 3, Secrets and Wonders of Media Spaces, shifts focus on to the obscure and magical spaces of the media and of mediation. Ericson’s essay sheds light on a physically present, but hidden media space of Broadcasting House – The British Broadcasting Corporation’s office and studio complex. His discussion is concerned with the physical design of the building, the complex functions entangled in its design and also in the symbolic aspects, which has provoked much debates among architects, critics and commentators. On the one hand this media space is seen as a sacred temple of communication, but it also functions as a carefully controlled machine for the production and transmission of sound. Themes of revelation and control also emerge in Jansson’s chapter, which focuses on two centres of media production and orchestration at the Expo 67: the Operations Control Centre and International Broadcasting Centre. As with the preceding chapter on Broadcasting House, Jansson offers a particular reading of these two facilities as highly orchestrated attempts to make visible and transparent mysterious media backspaces that have considerable influence in shaping the flow of people and information. This orchestrated spectacle demystifies the act of mediation and control but it is an estranging act – obscuring the potentially problematic acts of such centres of mediation and positioning the visitor as an observer of the media spectacle.
Sloan deconstructs the postcard; or, more specifically, pictorial representation of the moon on postcards and interrogates how these playful representations, once they are written, addressed and sent, thus being incorporated into networks of communication, interaction and interpretation, create strange and fantastic objects for viewers. Jacobs’ objects of attention are representations of museums and galleries in film. In films these venues are liminal sites and places of transgression for those “haunted, in hiding or are in transit” (297), which include spies, criminals, lovers, socially marginal characters alongside tourists and art connoisseurs. Museums and galleries in films reflect the superficiality of touristic consumption, while also demarking and reinforcing social distinction between the educated, the snobbish and those lacking cultural capital; they are spaces of contemplation as much they are sites of deviance, intrigue, danger and excitement where crimes, illicit meetings, chases and supernatural events take place. Representation in films is a theme also explored in the final chapter by Pike. He is concerned with the various manifestations of underground spaces from train lines, tunnels and sewers to hidden dwellings and realms. These hidden places of mystery, resistance, evil and awe sometime act as the backdrop or context to a more immediate, compelling plot, while at other times reflecting more broadly the vertical, hierarchical nature of society.
This is in an eclectic collection of essays, and although the editors make a good attempt to produce a coherent account of the (re)emerging themes of the book, it is inevitably the start of a dialogue on the subject rather than any attempt to produce a definitive notion of strange spaces, if such a thing was ever possible. This eclecticism means the individual chapters will appeal to readers interested in the specific subjects e.g. material culture (Löfgren), touristic sites and the multidimensional nature of touristic production/consumption (Wilbert and Hansen), cinematic (Pike; Jacobs), photographic (Sloan; Carney and Miller) and textual representation (Straw) or the contested nature of urban space (Hammond; Carney and Miller), but the book’s fundamentally ambiguous theme means it is unlikely to become a core reader of a particular university course or become the basis of a distinct area of academic debate. Nevertheless, this book, like any other provocative academic work challenges us to rethink and to re-imagine what may appear to us as natural, obvious and transparent, and to appreciate its strangeness.