Justin J. Bain
PhD Student in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric
Syracuse University
315-443-1412
jjbain@syr.edu
Projects: Social Space and Composition
When Our Spaces Are Not Our Own: Architectural Theory for Composition
I’d like to begin with a passage from Tillie Olsen’s Silences, one that I think traces quickly and starkly the importance of material conditions: "Literary history bears out that most of the great works of humanity have come from lives able to be wholly surrendered and dedicated. True for most women of the world still. Unclean; taboo. Three steps behind; the girl babies drowned in the river. Buried alive with the lord, burned alive on the funeral pyre, burned as witch at stake. Beaten, raped. Bartered. Bought and sold." Change a few words here and there and other marginalized groups tell the same story. If anything stands out in my presentation today, I’d like it to be that architectural theory places material conditions at the forefront of its work. And if only for that reason, composition should take a look at what it has to say.
I admit that composition is not primarily a spatial discipline, but space is important to its work. This is evidenced in the field by the reliance on a large number of spatial metaphors to describe everything from classrooms (workshops, studios) to teaching practices (scaffolding, contact zones) to epistemology (house of lore, discourse communities). While Composition has, as a field, relied on such metaphors, in fact has used metaphor as a method of self-understanding, it has yet to be deeply critical and reflexive about such use.
Concepts such as discourse communities, contact zones, borderlands, and margins, all rely on similar instantiations of metaphors of territory and travel, yet the metaphors that make them so powerful remain just that, metaphorical. In talking about them and the spaces they imply, however, I want to make it clear that I’m not attacking the projects of discourse communities, the value of contact zone theory, nor the importance and possibility of speaking from margins and borders. Instead, my critique is meant to highlight the importance of material conditions in the creation and use of these metaphors, conditions that are often overlooked in the implementation and valuing of the ideas and activities represented by these terms. My means of critique is to turn to an outside discipline, primarily that of architecture, to provide myself and composition with some vocabulary and concepts that I think are useful not only in understanding the metaphors by which we live and practice, but also the materially real spaces that we create and inhabit. In turning primarily to architecture, I don’t want or mean to discount the work being done in cultural studies, ethnography and anthropology, or cultural geography. Again my purpose is to support the work being done in those fields and to provide further theories and tools by which such work might be done.
Also, as I begin this presentation, I want to make clear that I do not understand the concept of space as stabile, but as being intimately related to and inseparable from, the concept of changing time. It will be useful, then, to keep in mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope in which time becomes palpable and visible. Bakhtin argues that the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins. And this is due to the special increase in density and concreteness of time markers—the time of human life, of historical time—that occurs within well-delineated spatial areas.
Some important work on materializing metaphors of territory and travel has already been done by Gregory Clark, Nedra Reynolds, Edward Soja, and Christina Haas among others. Let me start with a few ideas from Reynolds, and then I’ll move on to what architecture can contribute. Reynolds highlights for us that places are material, but always in flux, and that there is an interplay of identity with place. Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self and Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps are good examples of this fact. Both Gilyard and Villanueva present literacy histories of sorts, ones that rely heavily on ideas of self that are constructed from places of their past, from the home, the block, and the neighborhood. It is important to note, however, that while these places are in fact real, they exist materially in the world, it is in part their existence as constructs, imagined, lived, and textual, that provide the interplay with identity that Reynolds describes. So I could summarize by saying that subjectivity is always in flux in reference to place, which is also in flux—a parhaps not too novel insight but an important one.
Reynolds also highlights for us that all metaphorical understandings of place occur within real spaces. Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands, for instance, rightly asserts the importance of speaking from, and listening to, those who locate themselves or who have been located in, borders. And it is important to remember that those borders are more than imaginary steps to the margins, more than saying I am working class and so can speak freely for that social class. Borders have places and time that are very much real. And crossing borders is not free—literally: it costs time and money and planning. Borders are also very real lines dividing very real communities, with real consequences for trespassing, visiting, and inhabiting them. As bell hooks has said, locating oneself in the margin, and I might add having oneself located there by others, is difficult but sometimes necessary; margins are not safe places.
I have been saying the word "real" for several minutes now without really defining it, and I’m probably going to do that for the rest of this presentation, but I did want to note that while I am emphasizing the material as real, the imagined and its effects on identity construction are just as real. That is, as cultural geographers will tell us, the construction of identity is a spatial process, but this doesn’t connote a one to one correspondence. Instead, as in the Gilyard and Villanueva example, someone constructs the places that construct us, and we in turn construct those places for ourselves and for others. This construction takes place not only in physical materials like houses and schools, but in language, stories, and thought.
Architecture
So lets move on to what architecture might contribute to our understanding of real and imagined places, a phrase I borrow from Soja’s Thirdspace. Before getting into specifics, I want to note that architecture, as a field, is not naïve in its practice. Every architecture text I have read, spanning the theoretical scope from art nouveau to supermodernism, makes it clear that to make architectures is to make knowledge—to map the world—and that this is a political act.
So in terms of understanding the places we occupy and that occupy us, architectural theory lays out some useful distinctions between place and space with which to begin an analysis. Charles Goodsell, in a 1988 structural study of civic spaces, primarily city council chambers, distinguishes between space, place, and social space. For Goodsell, space is simply cubic volume, the amount of room it is possible for people and objects to occupy. Place, in contrast, is the identifiable domain of meaning, the material presence of objects, floors, walls, persons, and such from which we construct meaning. Social space, finally, can be understood primarily as the meanings drawn from our interaction with place.
What this three part definition lends to Reynolds work, among others, is a precise separation of the space we move in, the places we encounter in that space, and the way we make meaning in the creation of social space. If we take a look at the typical composition classroom employing these terms—and the same could be done with office spaces, buildings, or whole campuses and cities—we find the sort of thickening of space that Bakhtin’s chronotope describes. We also have at our disposal a method for categorizing and examining that space and the activities within it.
Goodsell’s work is usefully modified by that of Marc Auge and Hans Ibelings. Auge and Ibelings, in separate texts, make the argument that there is an important distinction between design and use. Design is an element of Goodsell’s place, something that is done to a certain space with certain intentions. Use is what gives a place meaning, what makes it social space, and while related to design and mediated by it, is not reducible to design; this is similar to the distinction between authorial intent and readerly reception in composition. What Auge and Ibelings add then is the concept of non-places, areas that fit Goodsell’s definition of a place but never achieve the interactive status of social space for a given individual. Such places function merely as human transit zones in that we pass through them but do not interact with them to create meaning. I can’t help but wonder how many of our classes function only as non-places for our students—as transit zones that they occupy for a few hours every week but that never take on a density of meaning. And I’m similarly left wondering if there might be something about those places themselves that encourage, and demand, just that sort of use.
The distinction between place and non-place parallels Kim Dovey’s 1999 analysis of power in built form. Dovey conducts her analysis on the assumption that to build is to frame, and the frame reflects the builder as it contains and orders space. Dovey’s analysis is therefore primarily concerned with what she identifies as a duality of built power, with "power to" as one aspect and "power over" as the other. Oversimplifying a bit, "power to" is what a built environment allows one to do, while "power over" is the constraints and coercions a built environment imposes. Following Foucault, Dovey asserts that power is always present, always implied, and it is therefore important to note its empowering/pleasurable effects as well as its repressive/painful ones. This means that amid movements to decenter classrooms, to make power less felt and less apparent, that something might be lost. It also means that no matter what our pedagogical stance, no matter the activities and assignments with which we engage our students, the classrooms in which we teach are themselves active participants in the economy of power. And this is something we need to consider as we choose the classrooms and computer clusters in which we teach and as we arrange those places for our students and for ourselves.
Home
It’s not too difficult to apply architectural theory to architecture or to geography, to buildings and neighborhoods and such. It’s a little more complicated to apply it to composition, so to ease into that I’d like to give you a quick application of the studies I’ve laid out to the place I grew up in California. In doing so I’ll be focusing specifically on the neighborhood as urban space, the designed and happened openness between buildings that provides a living environment, and often a community of sorts, for those who live there. I was born in Fresno, CA, and lived there all my life until I moved to Syracuse, NY for graduate school. My neighborhood was the Mayfair District, a large county island in the middle of the city. It was originally built after WWII as affordable housing for returning veterans. Upon returning from the war my grandfather married my grandmother and moved into a house in the newly built district.
Its physical construction emphasized community in a turbulent time for these veterans through the use of elongated blocks that folded back onto themselves, winding streets, pathways between houses, and few entrances to the neighborhood itself. Houses and yards were built without fences, and each backyard held a brick barbecue; design specifications by builders who felt this would allow for dialogue and community between neighbors. At the time it was built, Mayfair was the farthest thing north, the newest part of the city as it slowly expanded away from downtown to the south.
The roughly 32 blocks of the Mayfair District and the lines between city and county demarcated by canals and where streetlights and police patrols cease to function, provides Goodsell’s space. The one story two bedroom houses with their brick barbecues in the backyard and all the various details of the neighborhood are the place —there are no apartments, and stores are only allowed in a two block stretch on the south-western edge of the neighborhood. These are the text, so to speak, from which I draw meaning. That meaning comes as I live and interact with the place, as I form my ideas and my stories about it, and this meaning constitutes social space. It is not tangible in the same way as the sand on the canals in summer, but it is no less real for being different. The district as a whole, and particularly the blocks on which my family and my grandfather lived, function for me as social space and as places that I would say I know.
The space between the Mayfair District and the state university from which I received my BA, a space of approximately 5 miles, is no less full of place, no less full of particular houses and stores and lives, but for me that space is a non-place, a transit zone I passed through daily but did not engage. By the time I was born most houses in the district had fences between them, most of the brick barbecues were damaged and crumbling, and some houses had added rooms connecting the original house to garages which had all been built at the rear of properties. The neighborhood was, when I lived there, no longer a haven for veterans but a transitional community, a place where a working class family lived for a generation or two as their children made the difficult and problematic transition to middle class. Changes had also occurred outside the district’s boundaries as Fresno grew north and west.
Despite these changes the boundaries of the physical community remained clear regardless of the sense of community individuals living within the district did or did not feel. In Dovey’s terms, my life in the Mayfair District was framed by architects, by city planners, by school districts, and the like. Life in the district had clear borders, and like life in any city there is a sense of who lives where and where you do and don’t go. The Mayfair District had a power over me because of this knowledge, its social space was inscribed on my body for others to read. Yet it also gave me the power to, one I conceive primarily as the power to speak from a certain history, class, and location.
Applications
I could go on talking about this for a long time, but I promised a brief example, which I hope has clarified some of the concepts for you. So back to Composition. There are three primary applications I see for our field at this early stage in my research, though there will surely be more. The first is that architectural theory forces us to do more than employ metaphors that sound good. It makes us label the material—the space, place, social space, and non-place—of our personal and professional lives. For me, this means more than just the history of my neighborhood, it means the history of the school at which I teach, its buildings, its classrooms, and the objects within those places. Learning about and working within this historical material space has in fact been a project that I have taken up with the students in my class this year, something I’d be happy to discuss later.
Second, recognizing space and place means that the boundaries of a discourse community are not just discursive, that contact zones take place in the built environment of a classroom on a university campus, and that border-crossers cross, and risk more, than just linguistic boundaries. The spatial metaphors we employ need to be grounded in the spaces and places they occur, both theoretically and materially. And we need to begin to articulate with our students where the borders are—linguistic, material, and otherwise.
Third, architectural theory asks that as we pass from class to class and student to student, we be aware of the way we understand place, and the ways in which our students do the same. As I mentioned earlier, I think far too many students experience classrooms as non-places, as necessary transit zones through which they must pass but that function as little more. To make place into social space for students requires not only that we continue to teach in ways that involve students, but also that we recognize the ways in which identity, both ours and theirs, interacts with place. Such considerations might begin with a redesigning of classrooms, one that involves more than just putting desks in a circle. Integrating student thought into this process would also be invaluable, since even more than teachers, it is students who make use of classroom space. Many universities are now considering how framing creates social space and invokes power as they design new campuses and buildings. But for those of us who are simply assigned a different room each year, we must work to account for and make use of the framed spaces in which we teach.