Abstract
This essay
offers a critical yet sympathetic engagement with a body of
work produced some years ago in the area of phenomenological
geography. Despite the limitations of that work – not least
its dismissal of media as the technological determinants of
growing placelessness – phenomenological geographers have
provided various concepts and methods that can be applied in
the field of media and communications, with the aim of
developing what the author calls a phenomenological
investigation of media uses and environments. Their emphasis
on practical and emotional aspects of day-to-day existence –
more specifically, on habitual movements and unselfconscious
senses of place – suggests distinctive ways of exploring
media uses in situations of daily living. It is proposed
that one point of departure for future research on these
matters would be experiences of transnational physical
migration, which might be expected to involve a disturbance
of lifeworlds and a heightened reflexive awareness of
everyday environments – including media environments.
Key words:
everyday
life; experience; media use; migration; phenomenological
geography; place
Introduction:
Lifeworld, Time-Space Routine and Media
I want to
begin by reproducing a fragment of the (for me) quite
fascinating material on ‘everyday environmental experience’
that appears in a book published over 25 years ago, A
Geography of the Lifeworld (Seamon 1979: 55-6):
Waking at
7.30, making the bed, bathing, dressing, walking out of the
house at eight – so one group member described a morning
routine that he followed every day but Sunday. From home he
walked to a nearby café, picked up a newspaper (which had
to be the New York Times), ordered his usual fare
(one scrambled egg and coffee), and stayed there until nine
when he walked to his office. … ‘I like this routine and
I’ve noticed how I’m bothered a bit when a part of it is
upset – if the Times is sold out, or if the booths
are taken and I have to sit at a counter.’
The ‘group
member’ referred to here was a participant in what the
book’s author, David Seamon, calls an ‘environmental
experience group’. Seamon (1979: 20) explains how he set up
such groups at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
in order to explore the geographical aspect – sometimes
difficult to distinguish from other aspects – of what ‘is
generally called by the phenomenologist lifeworld –
the taken-for-granted pattern and context of everyday life
through which the person routinely conducts his [sic]
day-to-day existence without having to make it an object of
conscious attention’.[i]
The main
purpose of the environmental experience groups was precisely
‘to make the lifeworld a focus of attention’ (Seamon 1979:
20) – to describe and reflect on that which is typically the
domain of ‘a prereflective knowledge’. For Seamon (1979:
40), drawing on the work of philosopher Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1962), that prereflective knowledge is
closely related to ‘the notion of body-subject’ – the idea
that the body develops ‘its own special kind of purposive
sensibility’ through the repeated performance of what Seamon
terms, rather too romantically, ‘body ballet’. In other
words, ‘habitual movement’ might come to feel ‘automatic’.
Sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984: xxiii) has the similar
idea, inspired in part by the perspective of
ethnomethodology, that routine social activity depends on a
‘practical consciousness’: ‘all the things which actors know
tacitly about how to “go on” in the contexts of social life
without being able to give them direct discursive
expression’. Seamon’s groups can therefore be thought of, in
a certain sense, as having engaged in consciousness-raising
– seeking to bring ‘precognitive “givens”’ (Buttimer 1976:
281) into ‘discursive consciousness’, through the expression
of at least some of these tacitly known things that enable
the skilful accomplishment of everyday practices. They did
so by attempting to suspend what phenomenologists have
called the ‘natural attitude – the unquestioned
acceptance of the … experiences of daily living’ (Seamon
1979: 20).[ii]
In the
passage above, the group member is reported to have
described in detail the various elements of his morning
‘time-space routine’. This was a regular round of
activities, which involved him being in and moving through
familiar locations.[iii]
The pleasurable habit was broken only on Sundays, or else
when ‘I’m away or something special comes up’ (Seamon 1979:
171). As the group member goes on to conclude: ‘It’s not
that I figure out this schedule each day – it simply
unfolds’ (Seamon 1979: 171). What helped him to reflect on
his ordered pattern of movements were those rare occasions
when part of the day-to-day routine was ‘upset’. If his
‘basic contact’ with the ‘environment at hand’ – ‘an
essential component of at-homeness’ – got disturbed, it gave
rise to ‘noticing’: ‘A change in the world as known brings
itself to attention’ (Seamon 1979: 117). Such changes were
experienced as a source of mild irritation – feeling
‘bothered a bit’.[iv]
As someone
located in the field of media and communications (spatial
metaphors are hard to avoid), I am struck in particular by
the participant’s remarking on a daily newspaper, the New
York Times, as an integral part of his ‘lifeworld’.
Reading that newspaper, much like making the bed, eating
scrambled egg on toast or drinking coffee, was an utterly
normal and ordinary feature of his morning routine. I am
reminded here of Hermann Bausinger’s observation that the
newspaper may serve a ritual function as ‘a mark of
confirmation’, and so ‘reading it proves that the
breakfast-time world is still in order’ (Bausinger 1984:
344). Indeed, Bausinger actually comments on how regular
readers feel a sense of disruption when, for one reason or
another, their daily newspaper is unavailable – when, for
example, ‘the Times is sold
out’ (Seamon 1979: 56).
Having stated
that I find the data presented in Seamon’s book fascinating,
I should add that I am surprised by just how few references
there are to media uses in the accounts of environmental
experiences offered by his groups’ members. The participants
in the research were, after all, mainly students living in
an ‘industrial city’ in the US, and they presumably had
access to various media of communication in their everyday
lives. There are other fragments of material that point to
media as parts of a lifeworld. For instance, in the context
of an early evening routine that he followed after returning
from work, the brother of one of the group members is
reported to have regularly eaten his meal ‘in front of the
seven o’clock news on television’ (Seamon 1979: 56).
Elsewhere, somebody reports on the ritual of reading a book
in a favourite chair before going to bed at night (Seamon
1979: 178). A further, rather different example involves the
telephone: ‘A few times when using the phone, I’ve found
myself dialling my home number rather than the one I want …
I guess because that number is the one I call the most
often’ (Seamon 1979: 164-5).[v]
However, media uses do not feature in the book as a
significant aspect of ‘day-to-day existence’.
A possible
explanation for the low profile of media in the accounts is
the fact that Seamon, who guided group discussions, was
generally suspicious of developments in ‘mass
communications’. At one point in his book, then, he declares
that ‘technology and mass culture destroy the uniqueness of
places’ (Seamon 1979: 91). His line here is borrowed
directly from a fellow exponent of ‘phenomenological
geography’, Edward Relph (1976), and I will now present a
critique of their shared position on ‘place’ and ‘placelessness’.[vi]
Although I disagree fundamentally with the overall line they
take on media and social change, and while their work also
has other limitations, my critique is not wholly damning –
indeed, it is intended to be a sympathetic ‘positive
critique’, in the sense that Giddens (1993) gives this term
– because I believe the concepts and methods of
phenomenological geography have a valuable contribution to
make to the study of media uses in daily living.
Phenomenological Geography, Place and Placelessness
Phenomenological geography, which is often discussed in the
secondary literature as a form of ‘humanistic geography’
(e.g. Holloway and Hubbard 2001; Cresswell 2004), emerged
partly in response to different kinds of ‘geography without
human agency’ (Ley 1996) – in particular, the abstractions
of spatial science and structuralist Marxism. In addition,
Seamon (1979: 34-5) looks to go beyond rationalist ‘theories
of spatial cognition’, in which ‘spatial behaviour’
was seen to be shaped by people’s ‘cognitive maps’: ‘In
contrast to the view of the cognitive theorists, I argue
that cognition plays only a partial role in everyday spatial
behaviour; that a sizeable portion of our everyday movements
… is pre-cognitive and involves a prereflective knowledge
of the body’.[vii]
This clearly connects with the ideas on ‘body-subject’
mentioned earlier, but it is Seamon’s related ‘notion of
feeling-subject’ (Seamon 1979: 76) that aligns his approach
more closely with the work of Relph (1976) and others (e.g.
Buttimer 1976, 1980; Tuan 1977, 1996). The concept of
‘feeling-subject’ is employed by Seamon to help account for
people’s emotional, yet frequently ‘unselfconscious’ (Relph
1976: 65), ‘sense of place’ (Buttimer 1980). As Lewis
Holloway and Phil Hubbard (2001: 67) note, a common aim of
these geographers was to show how ‘creativity and emotion
are involved in the making of place’. An emphasis on
place as the product of social actions and interactions –
and, crucially, as an experiential construction rather than
simply a physical location – is a defining characteristic of
this approach.
Yi-Fu Tuan
(1996: 455) observes how place ‘can be as small as the
corner of a room or large as the earth itself’, depending on
the emotional ‘field of care’ that constructs it. However,
in Seamon’s book it is usually understood as made and
‘rooted’ in specific local settings, such as ‘streets,
neighbourhoods, market places, … cafés’ (Seamon 1979: 56).
Pursuing the choreographic metaphor, he argues that senses
of place are fostered by ‘place-ballets’ (Seamon 1980),
which involve an interpersonal mixing of body ballets and
time-space routines, and serve to transform spaces –
creatively and collaboratively – into significant places.[viii]
According to Seamon (1979: 25), place-ballet ‘appropriates
space’. ‘When humans … become attached to … a portion of
space’, comments Tim Cresswell (2004: 10), ‘it becomes a
place.’ The best way of illustrating this argument is with
reference to an example. In the passage below, the group
member whose morning routine was discussed at the outset
describes the ‘atmosphere’ of the café he frequented
‘between eight o’clock and nine’:
Several
‘regulars’ come in during that period … the undertakers
across the street, the telephone repairman and several
elderly people, including one woman named Claire, whom I
know and say ‘Good morning’ to each day. … Many of these
people know each other. The owner of the place knows every
one of the regulars and what they will usually order. This
situation of knowing other people – of knowing who’s there
at the time, recognising faces that you can say hello to –
somehow makes the place warmer.
(Seamon
1979: 171)
There was
evidently a feeling of ‘attachment’ to the café setting and
its regular inhabitants, which had become an important
aspect of his everyday environmental experience.
If the public
setting in the account was a site of ‘warmth’ for the group
member, then this warmth can also be felt in the private
sphere of a house or apartment – often referred to as a
‘home’. On the basis of personal stories told to him by his
research participants, Seamon proposes that such domestic
places form important ‘centres’ for day-to-day lives, even
in cases where the accommodation is short term. They were
found to be sites of ‘rest’ and ‘regeneration’, from which
physical journeys – long or short – were made and senses of
‘reach’ were extended ‘outward from … home’ towards
experiential ‘horizons’ (Buttimer 1980: 170).[ix]
A word of caution is needed, though. As Gillian Rose (1993:
56) and Roger Silverstone (1994: 28) each recognise, Seamon
is in danger of idealising the private household, which may
equally be a site of misery, division and ‘conflict’.
Indeed, even Relph (1976: 41-2) acknowledges the possible
‘drudgery of place’. There are some very different feelings
about daily domestic life, with certain people having rather
less opportunity for rest and regeneration than others.[x]
I would want to add, too, that opportunities for travelling
away from home – for being routed elsewhere – are likely to
be socially differentiated, as are the types of destination
arrived at and the sorts of horizon experienced.
For both
Seamon and Relph, a key point of reference in discussing
place is Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy –
particularly his notion of ‘dwelling’ (Heidegger 1993). On
the one hand, this notion appears to have been imported into
their writings as a complement to (what are, in my view) the
helpful concepts of ‘at-homeness – the
taken-for-granted situation of being comfortable … with the
world in which one lives … day-to-day life’ (Seamon 1979:
78) and ‘existential insideness’, which Relph (1976: 55)
defines as a sense of place ‘experienced without deliberate
and selfconscious reflection yet … full with significances’.
However, on the other hand, I believe that Heidegger’s
specific take on dwelling, which reads to me – in large part
– as nostalgic and highly conservative, is ultimately the
cause of a major problem for these phenomenological
geographers. It is telling that his main example of a
domestic dwelling-place is ‘a farmhouse in the Black Forest,
which was built some two hundred years ago … on the
wind-sheltered mountain slope, looking south, among the
meadows close to the spring’ (Heidegger 1993: 361-2).[xi]
In the work of Relph especially, this conception of dwelling
seems to give rise to an evaluative distinction between
‘authentic place-making’ – the art of which is supposedly
being lost – and the ‘inauthenticity’ of a new ‘placeless
geography’.
Within the
terms of a humanist perspective in geography, it must in
principle be possible for there to be ‘placeless’ space,
since not all spaces are routinely inhabited and
appropriated as places. David Ley (1996: 193) considers the
surface of the moon as a limit case, although – for some
social groups – even a physically remote and deserted
landscape might be invested with significance. Still, for
Relph the sites of placelessness are not uninhabited
wildernesses or moonscapes. Instead, he points to modernist
‘International Style architecture … with its functional and
efficient use of concrete, steel, and glass’, along with
locations that ‘declare themselves unequivocally to be
“Vacationland” or “Consumerland”’ (Relph 1976: 92-3). His
criticism of contemporary built environments is also
directed at the ‘subtopia’ of suburban residential
development with its ‘endless subdivisions of identical
houses’ (Relph 1976: 105).[xii]
Above all, though, he thinks of placeless geography as a
product of mass communication. Relph (1976: 90) includes
here, interestingly, modern transportation systems: ‘Roads,
railways, airports, cutting across or imposed on the
landscape rather than developing with it, are not only
features of placelessness in their own right, but … have
encouraged the spread of placelessness well beyond …
immediate impacts’.[xiii]
In a similar way, Relph (1976: 92) claims that print media
and broadcasting have ‘reduced the need for face-to-face
contact … and … the significance of place-based
communities’.
Seamon (1979:
142), as I have already suggested, buys into Relph’s
argument about ‘growing placelessness’. For two main
reasons, I am not persuaded by it. Firstly, for all their
talk of prioritising emotional or experiential constructions
in day-to-day existence, these phenomenological geographers
end up giving too much importance to issues of architecture,
planning and technology.[xiv]
It is accepted by Relph (1976: 123) that ‘character’ is
‘imputed to landscapes by the intentionality of experience’,
but a key target of his criticism is contemporary urban or
suburban design itself. The implication, therefore, is that
skyscrapers and modern housing estates are somehow innately
‘inauthentic’ environmental features. Media of communication
are also prematurely dismissed by Relph as the technological
determinants of placelessness, before he has inquired into
their everyday social uses.
Secondly,
Seamon’s own empirical evidence – gathered in the context of
a North American industrial city – does indicate that senses
of place are being articulated. Even a car or a
‘transportation terminal’, he notes, can become ‘a temporary
centre on a … trip’ (Seamon 1979: 73). Furthermore, I have
previously shown how members of his environmental experience
groups occasionally refer in their descriptions to the realm
of what he labels ‘mass culture’. So a daily newspaper or an
evening television news programme may be used in routine
rituals and ‘habitual’ practices of dwelling – helping to
facilitate feelings of at-homeness and existential
insideness for social actors. This evidence quite clearly
contradicts the hasty conclusion that places are necessarily
eroded by mass communications.
Elsewhere, in
developing a critique of the ‘no sense of place’ thesis
advanced by ‘medium theorist’ Joshua Meyrowitz (1985), my
point has been that place – far from disappearing – gets
pluralised or ‘doubled’ in acts of media use (Moores 2004).
For example, when people are engaged in conversation on the
mobile phone or listening to music through the headphones on
a personal stereo – in each case a private activity that is
routinely conducted in public settings – they might be
considered to be, in the words of sociologist Emanuel
Schegloff (2002: 286-7), ‘in two places at the same time …
there are two “theres” there’. As well as the spaces they
inhabit with their bodily or corporeal presence, then, these
people are simultaneously situated in auditory environments
that are generated with the assistance of electronic media
technologies.[xv]
Media of communication – not just ‘mass’ media but
interpersonal communication technologies too – thus enable
forms of ‘virtual coimplacement’ with others, leading to
what philosopher Edward Casey (1997: xiv) describes as ‘a
genuine, if still not fully understood, phenomenon of
place’.
However, in
my own discussion of ‘the doubling of place’[xvi],
I had a tendency to think of places in a limited way –
primarily as physical or virtual locales. I am now looking
to build on this work by incorporating from phenomenological
geography the insight that places are constructed through
human interactions and emotions. Of course, in order to do
so it is necessary to jettison the suspicion of media found
in Seamon’s book and, to an even greater extent, in the
writing of Relph. Instead of dismissing technologically
mediated communications as a threat to ‘face-to-face
contact’ and ‘place-based communities’, my preference would
be for a fuller exploration of those apparently automatic
uses of media in the habitual movements of the daily round
– in what Seamon calls time-space routines, body and
place-ballets – and also for an appreciation of what could
best be thought of, in general terms, as everyday
experiences of media environments. When referring to
such experiences, I have in mind subjective feelings about
precisely the sorts of virtual coimplacement that Casey
writes of. Is it possible, in fact, that many people have a
prereflective knowledge and practical consciousness of – a
basic contact with or attachment to – media environments,
from newspapers and television programmes to internet sites,
which are regularly ‘at hand’ in day-to-day lives? Can such
settings or environments become locations for the emergence
of what phenomenological geographers have named senses of
place and fields of care? Might the inhabitants of virtual
settings come to feel there that they are at home and
comfortable, adopting a ‘natural attitude’ to relations with
their sometime ‘incorporeal’ (Mitchell 1995: 10) fellow
dwellers?
An Example:
BlueSky
At this
stage, to help me to unpack the points I am making about
media environments, another example is required. Compare the
following account, which appears near the beginning of an
ethnographic study published quite recently (Kendall 2002:
1-2), with that of the café provided by an environmental
experience group member:
The Falcon is
a small, out-of-the-way place, known mainly to its regulars,
who tend to shun the occasional curious passersby. … As
usual around lunchtime, the bar is crowded. A few people sit
singly at tables, but most sit in small groups, often
milling around from table to table to chat with others. As
in many such local bars and pubs, most of the regulars here
are male. Many of them work for a handful of computer
companies in a nearby high-tech industry enclave. The
atmosphere is loud, casual, and clubby, even raucous.
Everybody knows each other too well here to expect privacy
at any of the tables.
As the
author, sociologist Lori Kendall (2002: 3-4), goes on to
reveal: ‘The Falcon is a hangout on … BlueSky … a type of
interactive, text-only online forum known as a mud.’[xvii]
Nevertheless, much like the café described earlier, it is a
unique public setting with its group of ‘regulars’ who are
recognisable to each other. It has its own atmosphere of
warmth and friendliness, at least for those insiders who
have become familiar with the layout and the social
conventions of ‘chat’ in this ‘bar’. The clientele is
different here, since many of the regulars are men working
in the computer industry in California – hence the shared
‘lunchtime’ zone, Pacific standard time – but there seems,
once again, to be a creative and collaborative process of
‘place-making’. In fact, there may even be a ‘place-based’
community, formed over a number of years in an
electronically at-hand environment. Kendall (2002:6) asserts
that a ‘synchronous’ online forum like BlueSky, which
allows for ‘near-instantaneous response’ from physically
distant others, ‘can provide a particularly vivid sense of
“place” … of gathering together with other people’. Despite
the absence of any bodily co-presence in the bar setting,
Seamon would surely be forced to admit that, in his terms, a
kind of place-ballet is being enacted by these participants
– who are jointly appropriating and investing significance
in a small portion of ‘cyberspace’.
Crucially,
since this is not just another story of what Kevin Robins
(1996: 101) has called ‘electronic Gemeinschaft’,
Kendall (2002: 8) also recognises that participants in an
online forum are doubly situated: ‘Nobody inhabits only
cyberspace.’ Writing of her personal emotions and
experiences, she notes that while ‘the mud provides for me a
feeling of being in a place’ there is still the physical
environment ‘in which my body resides’ – where, for
instance, her routine ‘mudding’ depends on the seemingly
effortless movement of her hands across the computer
keyboard, and her attention to the screen can be distracted
by ‘someone in the physical room in which I’m sitting’
(Kendall 2002: 7). There is the potential, therefore, for
‘two experiential worlds’ (Kendall 2002: 7-8) to co-exist
simultaneously. In referring to two worlds, though, she is
not implying that they are somehow entirely disconnected. On
the contrary, she thinks there is ‘a problem with viewing
cyberspace’ as a ‘sovereign’ realm (Kendall 2002: 8).[xviii]
Her commitment, then, is to understanding how social
activities in online and offline settings are interwoven.
‘Online relations do not occur in a cultural vacuum’,
concludes Kendall (2002: 225), and in the forum she
investigates there is a ritual performance of certain
masculinities that ‘intersect’ with identities and practices
in ‘offline realities’.
Indeed, one
of the most interesting features of Kendall’s ethnography
(from my perspective) is her reporting of offline meetings
with a number of the BlueSky participants, who
occasionally gathered together in situations of bodily
co-presence. John Urry (2002: 268), drawing on arguments
made by Deirdre Boden and Harvey Molotch (1994) concerning
the continued importance of physical proximity in
late-modern conditions, suggests that ‘intermittent
“co-presence”’ – by which he means meeting up ‘corporeally
from time to time’ – can be ‘significant even within …
virtual communities’. The virtual proximity afforded by
computer-mediated interaction does not straightforwardly
substitute for relating to others ‘face-to-face’. In certain
cases, as Kendall’s research shows, it actually helps to
constitute such face-to-face relations, so that ‘ties exist
in both physical space and cyberspace’ (Urry 2002: 268).
Further
Objections: Issues of Difference and Exclusion
Following my
discussion of place-making practices in a specific media
environment and its connection with social activities in
physical settings, I now want to extend this critique of
phenomenological geography by stating some further
objections. These have to do principally with issues of
difference and exclusion in the construction of places and
place-based communities, but before detailing them it is
first necessary to raise a couple of prior issues. I am
thinking here of the problematic tendency of
phenomenological geographers to approach human experience in
essentialist and universalistic ways, and also of their
leanings towards what Ley (1996: 209) calls ‘the excess of
idealism’.
Seamon’s work
offers clear evidence of the tendency towards essentialism
and universalism. At one point, then, he characterises the
project of phenomenology as an attempt to identify ‘the
essential human condition’, which will only be revealed
‘when all “non-essentials”’ – including ‘culture’ and
‘history’ – are ‘stripped’ away, leaving behind ‘the
irreducible crux of people’s life-situations’ (Seamon 1980:
149). His general definition of phenomenological geography
is as an area of study that ‘directs its attention to the
essential nature of man’s [sic] dwelling on earth’ (Seamon
1980: 148). As a consequence, he takes (and mistakes) the
words of a few American college students in the 1970s as a
representation of some universal state of humanity and
common condition of geographical being: ‘Their experiential
descriptions reflect human experience in its typicality’ (Seamon
1979: 23). The everyday environmental experiences of those
students were, of course, inevitably shot through with
culture and history. Moreover, the cultural and historical
specificities of ‘people’s life-situations’ and ‘dwelling on
earth’ – the particular ways in which individuals or social
groups construct and inhabit place – are surely of paramount
importance for investigations of day-to-day existence.[xix]
Earlier, in
my brief account of the development a humanist perspective
in the discipline of geography, I referred in passing to
Ley’s critique of forms of geography without human agency (Ley
1996). He saw the borrowings of geographers from
phenomenology as crucial for the reinstatement of human
agency as ‘a central theoretical question’ on the
discipline’s agenda, but it is also necessary to remember
that he warned his fellow geographers against adopting a
wholesale philosophical idealism, which would be marked by
the ‘uninhibited hegemony of consciousness and subjectivity’
(Ley 1996: 209). In other words, it is equally important to
avoid forms of geography without social structure.
Emphasising the emotional or experiential dimension of daily
living, as Seamon and others within the humanist tradition
have helpfully done, does not require blindness to matters
such as those to which I turn next – of difference and
exclusion.
Simon
Charlesworth’s study of day-to-day existence in Rotherham –
a town in South Yorkshire – during the 1990s (Charlesworth
2000) provides an interesting point of comparison with the
work done two decades earlier by Seamon in the US. On the
one hand, there are notable similarities between the
writings of those researchers, despite the fact that
Charlesworth is not a geographer and seems unaware of
Seamon’s ‘geography of the lifeworld’.[xx]
So Charlesworth, like Seamon before him, draws heavily on
ideas and concepts from phenomenological philosophy. Without
stating it in precisely these terms, he is evidently
concerned, too, with the formation of an unselfconscious
sense of place. He refers at length to Merleau-Ponty’s idea
of body-subject, before claiming that: ‘Understanding
Rotherham means understanding the habituated manner of
comportment through which the place exists’ (Charlesworth
2000: 92). Although Charlesworth does not adopt Seamon’s
related notion of feeling-subject, his book is also seeking
to explore the ‘affective’ dimension of place.
Yet on the
other hand, the approaches to experience taken by
Charlesworth and Seamon are, in at least one important
respect, dissimilar. This is because Charlesworth reads the
philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger through Pierre
Bourdieu’s theory of practice (cf. Bourdieu 1990, 2000;
Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), refusing to accept any
essentialist, universalistic or purely idealist conception
of consciousness and subjectivity. Bourdieu was himself
familiar with the literature of phenomenology and took a
critical interest in other ‘constructivist’ perspectives
including ethnomethodology. However, he insists that: ‘We
need to thoroughly sociologize … phenomenological analysis’
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 73).
Bourdieu’s
own sympathetic critique of phenomenology involves
developing Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on the body through the
key concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘practical sense’ (Bourdieu
2000: 142-3), in such a way that more materialist concerns
with social division, inequality and reproduction are built
firmly into the analysis. While the concept of practical
sense, which refers to ‘a pre-reflective … competence’ (Charlesworth
2000: 29), clearly resembles that of practical consciousness
found in Giddens’ sociology, Bourdieu puts far greater
emphasis on differences between the embodied dispositions of
various social groups in his discussions of class and
habitus. A classic example, in which he deconstructs
essentialist notions of taste, is his empirical survey of
patterns of preference in French cultural consumption in the
1960s (Bourdieu 1984). He therefore seeks to reconcile
‘subjectivist’ and ‘objectivist’ theoretical positions,
arguing that consciousness should be analysed in relation to
structural factors.[xxi]
Taking that lead, Charlesworth (2000: 11) tries to
comprehend the ‘particularity’ of contemporary working-class
experiences, which he sees as ‘overdetermined by economic
necessity’ in particular socio-spatial contexts – rather
than making general statements about the ‘nature of man’s [sic]
dwelling on earth’ (Seamon 1980: 148). The study is designed
to specify ‘the sense that life has for Rotherham people …
their being-in-the-world’ (Charlesworth 2000: 93).
Incidentally, I suspect that – on the basis of what
Charlesworth writes about the town – many ‘Rotherham people’
would be quite uncomfortable with the idea that they are
enacting a sort of ‘ballet’.
That
comparison between the perspectives of Charlesworth and
Seamon is useful in highlighting the culturally and
historically specific character of life-situations. It would
perhaps be better, then, to speak of ‘lifeworlds’ in the
plural, since ‘the taken-for-granted pattern and context of
everyday life’ identified by Seamon (1979: 20) is a socially
variable phenomenon. Indeed, even among people who share a
common physical locality, there may well be different,
possibly competing, place-making practices. With reference
to certain districts of London, for instance, geographers
Doreen Massey (1991, 1994) and Jon May (1996) have observed
the multiple and sometimes conflicting significances of
locations – Kilburn, Docklands and Stoke Newington – for
residents there who occupy very different social positions
and trajectories.[xxii]
Alongside
such questions of particularity and difference, I would also
like to raise those of segregation and exclusion. The key
point here is that phenomenological geographers, in focusing
on feelings of social inclusion and belonging – of at-homeness,
attachment, insideness, community and ‘centeredness’
(Buttimer 1980: 171) – did not have a great deal to say
about practices of social and spatial segregation, or what
David Sibley (1995) calls ‘geographies of exclusion’. To be
fair, Relph (1976) does employ the intriguing and (in my
view) potentially fruitful concept of ‘existential
outsideness’, although – in the context of his work – it
ends up playing much the same role as the problematic ideas
on placelessness that I have already reviewed. Experiences
of existential outsideness, according to Relph (1976: 51),
are primarily associated with built environments that
increasingly ‘assume the same meaningless identity’.
Places and
place-based communities can be described as having a
collaboratively produced atmosphere of human warmth and
friendliness, as was seen in the examples of café and bar
settings above (Seamon 1979; Kendall 2002), but it ought not
to be forgotten that senses of place or community usually
depend on there being an outside and groups of outsiders.
Holloway and Hubbard (2001: 77) remark on how – at
‘different scales’ – ‘“home” is often understood as a place
within which only certain people and things belong; it is a
place to which a person or group of people can withdraw from
the outside world’, while Cresswell (2004: 26) asserts that
places are frequently ‘founded on acts of exclusion’. At the
scale of the private household, then, physical and symbolic
boundaries of various kinds are created in order to separate
a home from the public world beyond, even though the
everyday use of domestic media technologies may help to make
such boundaries more permeable. There are also instances of
‘residential segregation’ at the scale of the local urban or
suburban neighbourhood – extreme cases of which are
middle-class enclaves known as ‘gated communities’ (Harvey
1996). ‘Here’, writes David Morley (2001: 432), ‘we confront
the politics of withdrawal and separation, both within the
city, and in the flight of privileged groups to the suburbs,
or to the countryside.’ Similarly, at the scale of the
national community, borders are policed with a view to
regulating mobility and residence in certain ways.
Returning to
Kendall’s ethnography of relationships in and around what
she terms ‘the virtual pub’, it turns out that the issue of
exclusion is vital in explaining the construction and
maintenance of a BlueSky community, as was implied by
her comment on how ‘its regulars … tend to shun the
occasional curious passersby’ (Kendall (2002: 1). She is
particularly interested in examining the sociable,
interactive ‘talk’ between participants in this online
forum, finding that: ‘Patterns of speech, persistent topics,
and a particular style of references to women and sex create
a gendered environment on BlueSky’ (Kendall 2002: 72). Her
participant observation in that ‘gendered environment’ led
her, she reports, to ‘attempt to become one of the boys’
(Kendall 2002: 98) on occasion. Nevertheless, Kendall (2002:
100) argues:
BlueSky
favors participation by men and excludes most women. …
BlueSky casts women as outsiders unless and until they prove
themselves able to perform masculinities according to the
social norms of the group. Women who are able to do so find
acceptance within the group, but their acceptance
reinscribes masculine norms, which continue to define women
as assumed outsiders.
In another
context, discussing the constitution of sociability in
relations between broadcasting and its audiences, Morley
(2000: 111-12) advances a similar argument, proposing that –
since sociability ‘can only ever be produced in some
particular cultural (and linguistic) form’ – not all viewers
and listeners will automatically feel ‘at home’ with the
offer of sociability made by ‘a given programme’, and so,
more generally: ‘Any one form of sociability must have its
constitutive outside, some necessary field of exclusions by
which the collective identity of those whom it interpellates
successfully is defined.’ Reinterpreting Relph’s ideas, it
might be possible to perceive the viewers and listeners who
do not feel they are addressed by a programme – or else the
mudders who are not at home on BlueSky – as
experiencing a certain ‘outsideness’ with regard to that
specific media environment.
Towards a
Phenomenological Investigation of Media Uses and
Environments
Despite the
limitations of phenomenological geography identified in my
critical commentary – especially the suspicion of media and
the related argument about growing placelessness, along with
the failure to address issues of difference and exclusion –
I still believe it is worth recovering (and
recontextualising) some of the key ideas and techniques
developed by Seamon, Relph and others who were working in
that academic area. To repeat, this is intended as a
‘positive’ critique. I have sought, above all, to stress the
ways in which these geographers provided a distinctive
understanding of place as a creative and collaborative
appropriation of space. It is by focusing on ‘everyday
geographies’, ‘intimate attachments’ and senses of place
that they have made a ‘significant contribution’ to their
discipline (Cloke et al. 1991: 81) My account of their
writings has pointed to a host of theoretical terms – a
number of which they drew from philosophy – that might also
have future applications in what I would like to call a
phenomenological investigation of media uses and
environments. For example, this includes the concepts of
lifeworld, prereflective knowledge, body-subject, time-space
routine, feeling-subject, field of care, reach, horizon,
existential insideness and existential outsideness.[xxiii]
In addition, my critique has touched on several
complementary concepts employed in work done outside the
discipline of geography, such as practical consciousness or
practical sense, virtual coimplacement and the doubling of
place.
Perhaps the
strongest advocate of ‘a phenomenological approach’ in the
field of media and communications at present is Paddy
Scannell (1995, 1996, 2000), a theorist and historian of
British broadcasting. His pioneering analysis of radio and
television foregrounds the orderly, methodical and
reproducible ways of ‘doing broadcasting’, which first had
to be discovered and implemented by broadcasters in order to
fill the available ‘air time’ each day – ‘today, tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow’ (Scannell 1996: 149). He shows
how broadcasting was accomplished with the discovery of
fixed schedules, serial-production and continuity
techniques, but also with the design of particular styles of
broadcast discourse or ‘public utterance’ that were intended
to fit the routine, private circumstances of domestic
viewing and listening. ‘In and through time’, he contends,
‘program output, in all its parts and as a whole, takes on a
settled, familiar, known and taken-for-granted character’ in
the everyday lives of audience members (Scannell 1995: 8).[xxiv]
Clearly, my
own interests overlap to some extent with Scannell’s. His
main concern is precisely with the historical formation of a
‘whole’ (national) broadcasting environment in which, he
claims, viewers and listeners find their ‘way about’ in an ‘essentially
unproblematic’ manner (Scannell 1996: 8). He asks how it is,
then, that radio and television are frequently found by
their users to be ‘ordinary everyday things’ (Scannell 1996:
6). This is a highly important line of inquiry, accompanied
by a detailed social history of institutional practices and
programme formats (cf. Scannell and Cardiff 1991). However,
I believe there is a problem with his approach – resulting
from his rejection of the need for further empirical
research on viewers’ and listeners’ uses of broadcasting in
daily living, and from a related assumption that radio and
television programmes have a basic ‘meaningfulness’ which is
‘there to be had … by anyone’ (Scannell 1995: 5).
Having ‘set aside’ any ongoing requirement to investigate
broadcasting’s day-to-day significances in specific social
circumstances, he is unable to access the detail and variety
of particular lifeworlds, or to deal with the possibility
that audience members may not always be able to find their
way about in broadcasting quite so comfortably – perhaps
especially in today’s multi-channel environment. In my view,
these matters cannot simply be set aside.
In
considering the development of appropriate empirical
research methods for the type of phenomenological
investigation being proposed here, I wonder whether – in
addition to observational work and conversational interviews
with individuals – Seamon’s innovative idea of setting up
environmental experience groups could also be applicable in
a more specialised study of media uses and environments? The
point of departure for his research, as I have already
stated, was the aim of unsettling common-sense knowledge so
as to reflect on it – of suspending the attitude of
‘unquestioned acceptance’ or taken-for-grantedness that
tends to accompany everyday activities. ‘Group inquiry’ is
important in this regard, for Seamon (1979: 24), because he
sees its potential to facilitate joint exploration and
‘intersubjective corroboration’ in the description of
experiences of ordinary things. Of course, there remain
genuine difficulties with the method of group discussion
that he employed. Not least, there is the difficulty of
bridging the gap between prereflective knowledge and
discursive consciousness. Even if it is the case, as Giddens
(1984: 328) puts it, that studying practical consciousness
‘means investigating what agents already know’, the utterly
familiar character of their knowledge about how to ‘go on’
in routine situations makes it hard to express in words.
Furthermore, sustaining joint exploration and regular
discussion over a lengthy period – as Seamon’s groups
managed to do on a weekly basis over the course of a
university semester – demands a level of availability and
commitment from participants that is hard to find in social
research. Despite the difficulties, though, group inquiry of
this sort, in which members would be encouraged to reflect
together on selected aspects of their media uses in daily
living, is likely to provide fruitful data.
As a
foundation for discussion, Seamon asked the members of his
environmental experience groups to engage in prior personal
reflection on themes he had chosen for them to explore in
their group meetings. Indeed, he notes that the initial
themes arose ‘out of a previous detailed phenomenology which
I had done of my own everyday environmental experience’ (Seamon
1979: 27). Anne Buttimer (1980), in an essay on experiences
of home that I have cited at various points above, also
reflects on her own senses of place – for instance, relating
her rather nostalgic memories of growing up in rural
Ireland. Like Seamon, she tends to buy into Relph’s
problematic thesis on growing placelessness, favourably
comparing ‘the feeling of the grass on bare feet’ and ‘the
smells and sounds of various seasons’ from an Irish
childhood (Buttimer 1980: 172) with the ‘skyscrapers,
airports, freeways, and other stereotypical components of
modern landscapes’ that she witnesses in North America,
which have – on her reading – ‘derided home’ (Buttimer 1980:
174). However, the kind of self-reflexive move made by
Seamon and Buttimer might sometimes be helpful in generating
lines of inquiry – so long as it is clearly understood that
academic researchers’ personal reflections or recollections
do not give access to a universally shared ‘human condition’
(Seamon 1980: 149).
From my
earlier insistence on recognising the culturally and
historically specific character of life-situations, it
follows that a phenomenological investigation of media uses
and environments should attend to the experiences of
particular social groups in particular socio-spatial
contexts. In conclusion now, I want to suggest one broad
direction – among several possible others – for future
empirical research on those issues that are opened up by my
critique. This would be to focus on media uses in daily
living (on non-uses, too) by people who have recently been
involved in a transnational physical migration.
The research
direction that is being suggested here actually arises out
of reflections on my own experience of migrating, with my
partner and our then two-year-old daughter, to live in
Melbourne in Australia – a move that could have been
permanent – before returning to the UK within a couple of
years, along with a second child born in Melbourne. I am
certainly not presenting this as a typical, representative
example of transnational physical migration.[xxv]
Nevertheless, I suspect that many migrants, on arriving in
their new locations of physical residence, are likely to
feel some degree of what my family and I initially
experienced in Australia – a disturbance of lifeworlds.
Whilst our destination was not completely unfamiliar to us,
since we had already visited it both physically and
virtually, we were moving out of social circumstances in
which there had been what Seamon conceptualises as a basic
contact with the everyday environments at hand – including
media environments – and into a situation marked by numerous
elements of strangeness.
I remember,
for example – especially in the first few months following
our arrival, and to my surprise – missing what were
previously quite ordinary, regular features of the daily
round, such as the sounds of BBC Radio 5 Live in the
house or car. From Melbourne, I accessed the station’s web
site via the internet, yet this provided a far more
occasional and increasingly detached experience of
listening. During the same period, my outsider experience of
watching Australian television was one of only gradually
finding my way about in the various channels, with just a
few points of recognition on the screening of certain drama
series or children’s programmes. After a year in Australia,
though, I felt my fingers moving automatically and
effortlessly across the buttons on the remote control
device. Moments in the weekly schedule were pleasurably
anticipated, and I had become familiar with several of the
formats and personalities appearing on screen. In addition,
telephone, email and web cam contact – virtual proximity –
with family members and friends in the UK was valuable, as
we attempted to find our feet in a new country. On most
mornings, the home computer was ritually turned on to check
for messages deposited for us, from across the globe, in the
inbox overnight. There was also an intermittent to-and-fro
of cards, small gifts and home videos exchanged via the
international postal system, as well as the odd corporeal
visit from a relative or friend.
Migration is
of interest to me here, then, precisely because it can bring
a disruption of day-to-day existence that might, in turn,
give rise to a noticing and heightened reflexive awareness
of environmental experiences. It also raises questions about
the ways in which a migrant – considered both as
body-subject and as feeling-subject – might subsequently
begin to accomplish the practical and emotional task of
re-establishing habitual movements or senses of place. How
are time-space routines and dwellings – at different
geographical scales – reconstructed, with the possibility
that experiences of at-homeness could be modified and
multiplied? Is there a reorganisation of senses of reach and
experiential horizons that accompanies this process?
Crucially, from my perspective, do media sometimes figure
significantly in those transformations?
Of course, I
am well aware that there is now a rapidly expanding
literature in cultural studies on the role of media in what
Marie Gillespie (2000) labels ‘diaspora communities’. In
fact, in a recent critical contribution to that literature,
Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy (2006) draw productively on
Scannell’s phenomenological approach to broadcasting. Given
the focus of their empirical research, which is on ‘London
Turks’ watching television broadcast live from Turkey via
satellite, it is perhaps surprising that Scannell – whose
‘overall project … is very national in its orientation’
(Robins and Aksoy 2006: 93) – should be a key point of
reference for the arguments they make about the meanings of
this ‘transnational’ flow of media images and sounds.
However, what Robins and Aksoy (2006: 95) suggest is that,
while Turkish migrants living in London ‘enjoy and
appreciate’ many of the programmes accessed via satellite,
‘the care structures of television’ – its
‘for-anyone-as-someone structures’ (Scannell 2000) – can
occasionally ‘break down’ in situations of transnational
communication. This is because – outside of Turkey, in the
British context of physical residence – the ‘conditions no
longer exist’ for established members of migrant cultures to
feel completely at home in ‘Turkish broadcasting’: ‘they can
no longer watch … from the inside, as it were’ (Robins and
Aksoy 2006: 96-7). The way in which these researchers apply
such notions of insideness and outsideness, in a discussion
of complex connections (and disconnections) between the
physical and media environments inhabited by migrants,
appears to be entirely in line with my positive critique of
phenomenological geography.
Still, the
excellent work done by Robins and Aksoy by no means exhausts
the issues that I am raising. The overwhelming emphasis in
current cultural studies of diaspora communities is on the
established members of migrant cultures, and often on the
formation of second-generation, diasporic identities (e.g.
Gillespie 1995). As a consequence, to date, little specific
attention has been paid to media uses and non-uses in the
period immediately following a transnational physical
migration. An investigation of this initial period of
potential disruption and reconstruction offers the best
prospect, in my view, for a phenomenological analysis of
‘how it is that migrants experience migration, and how they
… make sense of their experiences’ (Robins and Aksoy 2006:
98).
Acknowledgements
Versions of
the arguments made in this essay have been presented to the
2005 International Association of Media and Communication
Research (IAMCR) Conference in Taipei – with Tony Wilson’s
kind assistance – and the 2006 Media, Communication and
Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) Conference in Leeds,
as well as in talks that were given at Universität Bremen
and Goldsmiths College, University of London. I am grateful
to David Seamon, who has taken the time to write a response
to this essay for publication in the journal. Although we
disagree on certain matters, I very much welcome the
dialogue between us. In addition, I am indebted to the late
Roger Silverstone for his comments on a previous talk of
mine that was given at the London School of Economics and
Political Science (cf. Moores 2003), in which he insisted on
the relevance of phenomenological geography to my interests
in media and place. To my knowledge, Roger has been the only
academic in the field of media and communications to make
more than a passing reference to the ideas of the
phenomenological geographers – in his important book,
Television and Everyday Life (Silverstone 1994: 26-8).
References
Augé, M.,
Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of
Supermodernity, London: Verso, 1995.
Bausinger,
H., ‘Media, Technology and Daily Life’, Media, Culture
and Society, 6: 343-51, 1984.
Boden, D. and
Molotch, H., ‘The Compulsion of Proximity’, in R. Friedland
and D. Boden (eds) NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity,
Berkeley and Los Angeles CA: University of California Press,
1994.
Bourdieu, P.,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
Bourdieu, P.,
The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity, 1990.
Bourdieu, P.,
Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge: Polity, 2000.
Bourdieu, P.
and Wacquant, L., An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology,
Cambridge: Polity, 1992.
Bull, M.,
Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management
of Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Buttimer, A.,
‘Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld’, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 66: 277-92, 1976.
Buttimer, A.,
‘Home, Reach and the Sense of Place’, in A. Buttimer and D.
Seamon (eds) The Human Experience of Space and Place,
London: Croom Helm, 1980.
Buttimer, A.
and Seamon, D. (eds), The Human Experience of Space and
Place, London: Croom Helm, 1980.
Casey, E.,
The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkeley and
Los Angeles CA: University of California Press, 1997.
Charlesworth,
S., A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Cloke, P.,
Philo, C. and Sadler, D., Approaching Human Geography: An
Introduction to Contemporary Theoretical Debates,
London: Paul Chapman, 1991.
Cresswell,
T., Place: A Short Introduction, Malden MA:
Blackwell, 2004.
Crossley, N.,
The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire, London:
Sage, 2001.
Deem, R.,
All Work and No Play? The Sociology of Women and Leisure,
Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1980.
Garfinkel,
H., ‘Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities’,
in Studies in Ethnomethodology, Cambridge: Polity,
1984.
Giddens, A.,
The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of
Structuration, Cambridge: Polity, 1984.
Giddens, A.,
‘Time, Space and Regionalisation’, in D. Gregory and J. Urry
(eds) Social Relations and Spatial Structures,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985.
Giddens, A.,
Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity, 1991.
Giddens, A.,
New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of
Interpretative Sociologies, 2nd edn,
Cambridge: Polity, 1993.
Gillespie,
M., Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change,
London: Routledge, 1995.
Gillespie,
M., ‘Transnational Communications and Diaspora Communities’,
in S. Cottle (ed.) Ethnic Minorities and the Media:
Changing Cultural Boundaries, Buckingham: Open
University Press, 2000.
Harvey, D.,
‘From Space to Place and Back Again’, in Justice, Nature
and the Geography of Difference, Cambridge MA:
Blackwell, 1996.
Heidegger,
M., Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.
Heidegger,
M., ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings,
revised edn, London: Routledge, 1993.
Hermes, J.,
Reading Women’s Magazines: An Analysis of Everyday Media
Use, Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
Holloway, L.
and Hubbard, P., People and Place: The Extraordinary
Geographies of Everyday Life, Harlow: Prentice Hall,
2001.
Jacobs, J.,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
New York: Vintage, 1961.
Kendall, L.,
Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and
Relationships Online, Berkeley and Los Angeles CA:
University of California Press, 2002.
King, P.,
Private Dwelling: Contemplating the Use of Housing,
London: Routledge, 2004.
Ley, D.,
‘Geography Without Human Agency: A Humanistic Critique’, in
J. Agnew, D. Livingstone and A. Rogers (eds) Human
Geography: An Essential Anthology, Malden MA: Blackwell,
1996.
Lull, J.,
Inside Family Viewing: Ethnographic Research on Television’s
Audiences, London: Routledge, 1990.
Massey, D.,
‘A Global Sense of Place’, Marxism Today, June: 24-9,
1991.
Massey, D.,
Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity, 1994.
Massey, D.,
‘The Conceptualization of Place’, in D. Massey and P. Jess (eds)
A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Massey, D.,
For Space, London: Sage, 2004.
May, J.,
‘Globalization and the Politics of Place: Place and Identity
in an Inner London Neighbourhood’, Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers, 21: 194-215, 1996.
Merleau-Ponty,
M., Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1962.
Meyrowitz,
J., No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on
Social Behavior, New York: Oxford University Press,
1985.
Miller, D.
and Slater, D., The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach,
Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Mitchell, W.,
City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn,
Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Moores, S.,
‘Media, Flows and Places’, Media@LSE Electronic Working
Paper 6 (accessible online), London School of Economics and
Political Science, 2003.
Moores, S.,
‘The Doubling of Place: Electronic Media, Time-Space
Arrangements and Social Relationships’, in N. Couldry and A.
McCarthy (eds) MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a
Media Age, London: Routledge, 2004.
Moores, S.,
Media/Theory: Thinking About Media and Communications,
London: Routledge, 2005.
Morley, D.,
Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity,
London: Routledge, 2000.
Morley, D.,
‘Belongings: Place, Space and Identity in a Mediated World’,
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4: 425-48,
2001.
Pred, A.,
‘The Choreography of Existence: Comments on Hägerstrand’s
Time-Geography and Its Usefulness’, in J. Agnew, D.
Livingstone and A. Rogers (eds) Human Geography: An
Essential Anthology, Malden MA: Blackwell, 1996.
Relph, E.,
Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 1976.
Robins, K.,
‘Cyberspace and the World We Live In’, in Into the Image:
Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision, London:
Routledge, 1996.
Robins, K.
and Aksoy, A., ‘Thinking Experiences: Transnational Media
and Migrants’ Minds’, in J. Curran and D. Morley (eds)
Media and Cultural Theory, London: Routledge, 2006.
Rose, G.,
Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge,
Cambridge: Polity, 1993.
Scannell, P.,
‘For a Phenomenology of Radio and Television’, Journal of
Communication, 45(3): 4-19, 1995.
Scannell, P.,
Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological
Approach, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Scannell, P.,
‘For-Anyone-as-Someone Structures’, Media, Culture and
Society, 22: 5-24, 2000.
Scannell, P.
and Cardiff, D., A Social History of British
Broadcasting, 1922-1939: Serving the Nation, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991.
Schegloff,
E., ‘Beginnings in the Telephone’, in J. Katz and M. Aakhus
(eds) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private
Talk, Public Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
Seamon, D.,
A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and
Encounter, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979.
Seamon, D.,
‘Body-Subject, Time-Space Routines and Place-Ballets’, in A.
Buttimer and D. Seamon (eds) The Human Experience of
Space and Place, London: Croom Helm, 1980.
Seamon, D.,
‘A Singular Impact: Edward Relph’s Place and
Placelessness’, Environmental and Architectural
Phenomenology, 7(3): 5-8, 1996.
Sibley, D.,
Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the
West, London: Routledge, 1995.
Silverstone,
R., Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge,
1994.
Thrift, N.,
‘Summoning Life’, in P. Cloke, P. Crang and M. Goodwin (eds)
Envisioning Human Geographies, London: Arnold, 2004.
Tuan, Y-F.,
Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience,
Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
Tuan, Y-F.,
‘Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective’, in J. Agnew, D.
Livingstone and A. Rogers (eds) Human Geography: An
Essential Anthology, Malden MA: Blackwell, 1996.
Turkle, S.,
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996a.
Turkle, S.,
‘Parallel Lives: Working on Identity in Virtual Space’, in
D. Grodin and T. Lindlof (eds) Constructing the Self in a
Mediated World, Thousand Oaks CA: Sage, 1996b.
Urry, J.,
Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First
Century, London: Routledge, 2000.
Urry, J.,
‘Mobility and Proximity’, Sociology, 36: 255-74,
2002.
Wilson, T.,
Watching Television: Hermeneutics, Reception and Popular
Culture, Cambridge: Polity, 1993.
[i]
In a later version of this definition, Seamon (1980:
149) inserts the qualifying term ‘constantly’ before
‘an object of conscious attention’.
[ii]
It is worth noting that there are some parallels
between the efforts of Seamon’s groups to suspend
such an attitude and the breaching experiments
conducted by Garkinkel (1984), in his
ethnomethodological studies of the ‘routine grounds
of everyday activities’. In each case, an unsettling
of common-sense knowledge and taken-for-granted ways
of doing is designed to demonstrate their largely
unnoticed existence.
[iii]
These locations are known in time-geography as
‘stations’ on the daily ‘time-space path’ (cf.
Giddens 1984, 1985). Pred (1996) provides a helpful
summary of the ‘time-geographic’ perspective on ‘the
choreography of existence’, of which Seamon would
have been aware. Hägerstrand – the key figure in
time-geography – wrote the foreword to Buttimer and
Seamon (1980), and visited Clark University in the
1970s. Indeed, Seamon went on from there to work as
a research fellow in Hägerstrand’s department in
Sweden.
[iv]
Of course, there is a danger that routine social
actions can become compulsive – so that their
disruption is experienced as more than simply a
source of mild irritation – but time-space routines
are also an important basis for creativity,
according to Giddens (1991: 40-1).
[v]
I am reminded here of comments made by Merleau-Ponty
(1962: 144) on the ‘knowledge in the hands’ of the
typist – ‘a knowledge bred of familiarity’. Crossley
(2001: 122) pursues this point in a fascinating
account of his own use of the keyboard on a word
processor: ‘I seem actually to be thinking with my
fingers … when I am in full flow … I could not
give a reflective, discursive account of the
keyboard layout.’ As he goes on to conclude,
‘knowledge I have of the keyboard is a practical,
embodied knowledge, quite remote and distinct from
discursive knowledge’ (Crossley 2001: 122).
[vi]
Seamon (1979: 10) recommends ‘the interested reader’
to Relph’s Place and Placelessness, as ‘a
complement’ to his own work. Elsewhere, he describes
their common approach as ‘phenomenological’
geography (Seamon 1980). Years later, Seamon (1996)
also published a retrospective piece on Relph’s
book.
[vii]
More recently in geography, Thrift (2004: 85) – in
advancing his arguments for the relevance of
‘non-representational theories’ – has put a similar
emphasis on ‘non-cognitive dimensions of
embodiment’. He asserts that ‘only the smallest part
of thinking is explicitly cognitive’ (Thrift 2004:
90).
[viii]
As well as drawing on time-geography, with its
conception of day-to-day movements as ‘a weaving
dance through time-space’ (Pred 1996: 638), Seamon
(1979: 58) also refers to the idea of ‘an intricate
sidewalk ballet’ that is found in the work of Jacobs
(1961).
[ix]
Here, it is crucial to remember that ‘mobilities’ –
‘imaginative’ or ‘virtual’ as well as ‘corporeal’
(Urry 2000, 2002) – and senses of reach, which can
now be ‘infinitely extended through … involvement
with the mass media’ (Silverstone 1994: 28), may
lead to complex reconstructions of home and
lifeworld.
[x]
With regard to gender, this point has been
established for many years now – in feminist
research demonstrating the uneven distribution of
leisure and labour in some households (cf. Deem
1980). The findings of such research raise doubts
about a wholly ‘happy phenomenology of the home’
(Sibley 1995: 94).
[xi]
King (2004) has a far less nostalgic take on ‘the
use of housing’ for ‘private dwelling’, while still
borrowing the insights offered by Heidegger.
[xii]
The aversion of phenomenological geography to
modernist architecture and to what Relph (1976: 89)
calls ‘quasi-scientific planning’ in an urban or
suburban environment is perhaps understandable in
historical context, because at the time they were
widely perceived as leading to the destruction of
older, settled patterns of life. Yet he concedes
that ‘being lived-in confers some authenticity on
even the most … unrelentingly uniform landscapes’ (Relph
1976: 80).
[xiii]
Augé (1995) later makes much the same case for
understanding motorways, service stations,
high-speed trains and airport departure lounges as
‘non-places’.
[xiv]
Interestingly, although Seamon was trained in the
discipline of geography, he now has a professorial
position in an architecture department in the US.
[xv]
Bull (2000) has presented a pioneering, qualitative
empirical study of the uses of personal stereos in
urban environments. Of particular interest there,
for me, is his attempt to develop a ‘critical
phenomenology’ (Bull 2000: 11) of users’
experiences. For instance, he writes about how
personal-stereo use can help to reconfigure the
‘site’ and ‘horizon’ of everyday experience (Bull
2000: 31-41).
[xvi]
This phrase is coined by Scannell (1996), in his
analysis of ‘eventfulness’ in broadcasting. In
borrowing it from him, I have sought to extend its
applications.
[xvii]
‘Muds’ are internet ‘Multi-User Domains’ (Kendall
2002: 4; cf. Turkle 1996a, 1996b).
[xviii]
A valuable critique of internet studies that
approach cyberspace as ‘apart from’ rather
than as ‘part of everyday life’ is to be
found in the ‘ethnographic approach’ to internet use
advocated by Miller and Slater (2000: 4-7).
[xix]
Which is not to say that there are no human
universals. An obvious example would be mortality –
the ‘finite’ character of the lifetime of any
individual, which Giddens (1984: 35), alluding to
the thought of Heidegger (1962), refers to as ‘being
towards death’.
[xx]
Charlesworth (2000: 11-12) describes his own
research approach as a form of ‘philosophical
anthropology’.
[xxi]
Once again, there are some parallels with Giddens’
theory of ‘structuration’ (Giddens 1984).
[xxii]
I have discussed Massey’s important work on place
elsewhere (Moores 2003, 2005). While recognising the
significance of boundaries, she has stressed ‘the
openness of places’ – places as the product of
multiple and unevenly experienced ‘connections and
interrelations’ (Massey 1995: 59) on a potentially
global scale. Her work is, therefore, an implicit
rejection of aspects of the conceptualisation of
place found in phenomenological geography: ‘place as
closed, coherent, integrated as authentic’ (Massey
2004: 6).
[xxiii]
Some of these concepts have already been employed in
the field of media and communications in the past. I
have noted the use of the idea of reach by
Silverstone (1994), and the notion of horizon by
Bull (2000). See also Wilson’s analysis of popular
television and its conditions of reception (Wilson
1993) – he writes there of lifeworlds and horizons –
and Scannell’s reflections on the ‘care-structures’
of broadcasting (Scannell 1996), to which my
attention turns shortly. In addition, there is other
work in the field that is highly relevant to my
concerns here – most notably, Lull’s
ethnomethodological perspective on the practical
accomplishments of television viewing in household
life (Lull 1990) and Hermes’ qualitative study of
readers of women’s magazines (Hermes 1995), in which
she draws on the phenomenological sociology of
Schutz.
[xxiv]
See my much fuller account of his work on radio and
television, which includes a discussion of the
important concept of ‘dailiness’ (Moores 2005).
[xxv]
Since we were a white, English-speaking, British
middle-class family moving freely from one
predominantly Anglophone culture to another, after I
had secured a position at the University of
Melbourne. It is significant, too, that there was
the option for us to return – a choice which is
certainly not open to all migrants.