Steve Pile

The Body and the City : Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity

Over the last century, psychoanalysis has transformed the ways in which we think about our relationships with others. Psychoanalytic concepts and methods, such as the unconscious and dream analysis, have greatly impacted on social, cultural and political theory. Reinterpreting the ways in which Geography has explored peoples mental maps and their deepest feelings about places, The Body and the City outlines a new cartography of the subject. The author maps key coordinates of meaning, identity and power across the sites of body and city. Exploring a wide range of critical thinking, particularly the work of Lefebvre, Freud and Lacan, he analyses the dialectic between the individual and the external world to present a pathbreaking psychoanalysis of space.

All or Nothing? Politics and Critique in the Modernism-Postmodernism Debate

The abstract for this paper is presented in the form of a preface: Preface. In this paper we are concerned with the structure of the debate over modernism and postmodernism in geography. We feel we are being asked to take a position, for (or against) modernism and against (or for) postmodernism. We have different reasons for refusing the politics of this choice. Both of us take a separate route to this refusal, as shown in this paper. Some words of warning are necessary before we begin. Given the broad scope of this paper, it will be obvious that some liberties will have to be taken in the presentation. We hope that these limitations will be excused by readers sympathetic to the underlying purpose of the paper, which is to invite the most general of debates on this topic(1). In this vein, we conclude that there are more possibilities for critical and subversive geography than we are being allowed.

Intimate Distance: The Unconscious Dimensions of the Rapport Between Researcher and Researched

To explore how psychoanalysis might contribute to the methodology of human geography, this article returns to Freuds experiences of psycho-logical analysis before he develops psychoanalysis as a distinct understanding of the mind, identity formation, and subjectivity. Going back over the early history of psychoanalysis, Freuds psychoanalysis can be seen as an attempt to solve a set of problems inherent in late nineteenth-century psycho-logical analysis. Thus, it is possible to cast his methodological solutions in a new light. In particular, this article explores the problems associated with the unconscious rapport that developed in the therapeutic use of hypnotism in the cure of hysterical symptoms, for both doctor and patient. Freuds techniques can be seen as a way to produce an appropriate detachment—or intimate distance—between himself and his clients. This intimate distance is instructive. As a corrective to certain trajectories within human geography, this article identifies five methodological propositions that might inform future research.

Oral history and teaching qualitative methods

Abstract Using oral history, students are able both to experience some of the issues in qualitative research as well as to carry out a piece of practical work. The three main sections of the paper deal with teaching reading—showing how students may come to appreciate how texts are constructed and may be introduced to the necessary use of theory in interpretation so as to confront the problem of naive empiricism: teaching listening—encouraging an interactive and empathetic mode of interviewing; and teaching writing—demonstrating models of reporting and interpretation. The conclusion outlines some of the problems encountered in teaching this material and some of the modifications to the teaching strategy designed to confront these difficulties.

The Strange Case of Western Cities: Occult Globalisations and the Making of Urban Modernity

This paper explores the implications for thinking about Western cities of the argument, within post-colonial studies, that Europe (and, therefore, the West) needs to be provincialised. It is argued that Western cities might also be successfully provincialised. The example of the occult is used to show: first, how distinctions between the West and the rest of the world have been drawn; secondly, to reveal how magical beliefs and practices circulate through Western cities, exposing occult globalisations that do not necessarily begin or end in the West; and, thirdly, to unsettle the prevalent assumption that Western cities are untouched by magic. Having tracked the occult globalisations that flow (in time and space) through Western cities, it is concluded that it is vital to provincialise the West both by placing it within older and wider patterns of knowledge and power and, additionally, by paying close attention to the magic of modern city life.

The place of spirit Modernity and the geographies of spirituality

In this paper, we seek to map out the key coordinates in debates in Human Geography about the secularization and postsecularization of western modern societies. In particular, we spell out the specific geographies through which geographies of religion have been imagined. These commonly involve such spatial metaphors as islands, networks, spheres, and the like. Less attention has been given to spirituality in non-religious contexts. We conclude that adding non-religious spiritualities to the mix of geographies of religion requires rethinking more than the boundary between secularity and religion, but rethinking what we understand by secularity and religion themselves.

Spatialities of Skin: The Chafing of Skin, Ego and Second Skins in T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom

This article explores the relationship between skin, ego and second skins. It does so conceptually by re-examining Freud’s suggestion, in The Ego and the Id, that the ego is first and foremost a bodily entity, while also being a projection of a surface (i.e. skin). Drawing upon Anzieu, a dynamic model of inter-weaving surfaces can be seen to underpin an understanding of the ego — and skin ego. This model is fundamentally spatialized. Even so, an appreciation of the spatialities of skin and ego can be developed further. To illuminate these spatialities, this article examines two key experiences of T.E. Lawrence during his military service in Arabia (c. 1917), as he describes them in his autobiographical account Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In a meeting with British military police, and in the notorious Deraa rape incident, what is at stake is Lawrence of Arabia’s skins. Reading these experiences using Freud and Anzieu, the article argues that these events re-present an ongoing chafing of Lawrence’s skin, ego and second skins, which can be called his ‘skin of suffering’.

Psychics, crystals, candles and cauldrons: alternative spiritualities and the question of their esoteric economies

Studies of alternative and ‘New Age’ spiritualities and of the paranormal in popular culture hint at the existence of underlying economic relationships that are, though small in size by some measures, both significant and influential. This paper seeks to foreground the economic relationships underpinning the beliefs, practices and activities associated with alternative spiritualities. For, as we argue, these have either been marginalised in most studies of alternative spirituality or been understood in very limited terms, as a narrow reflection of contemporary capitalist consumer culture. This paper consequently asks how we might bring to view the economic relationships that necessarily accompany alternative spiritualities by exploring their size, shape and reach. Here, we draw on UK-based case studies of Manchester and London. Our exploration of alternative spiritualities and their economic relationships concludes that even while alternative spiritualities are woven into, and out of, ordinary economic relationships, there remains an intriguing sense that there is something distinctively esoteric about their economies. This, we believe, warrants further investigation (in the UK and beyond) into this too often marginalised aspect of contemporary culture and modern economic life.

Skin, race and space: the clash of bodily schemas in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks and Nella Larsen’s Passing

Nella Larsen’s novel Passing offers the opportunity to reconsider the relationship between race and space. The novel provides an account of space that is highly racialized. It describes 1920s Chicago as having heavily proscribed white and black spaces. However, race itself is far more uncertain. The novel’s two main characters, Irene and Clare, though black by blood in US American racial schematics, are both able to pass as white. Their skin colour renders their race ultimately unknowable: they can easily cross the borders between the white and the black world. By using Frantz Fanon’s notions of corporeal schemas and epidermal schemas, and by focusing on skin itself, it is possible to open up another way of seeing race and space in the novel. The paper argues that these bodily schemas ultimately clash, and come to grief, in the novel. Even so, this clash of bodily schemas enables a possible resolution to the problem of seeing the body either through black/ white grids of signification and power, or through their aggregation into phenotypes or races. In this view, bodily schemas may come to define race and space, but never exclusively in one way or another.

Spirit knows: materiality, memory and the recovery of Spiritualist places and practices in Stoke-on-Trent

Abstract Much has been written about constructing memories of place, yet few speak of the difficulties in dealing with lost, partial and fragmented histories of place. We argue that behind the idea of ‘memory of place’ is an assumption that these memories are recoverable and can build a sense of place. Our research has led us to assume the opposite: not just that the fragments of history cannot build a complete memory of place, but that this understanding of memory and place is itself skewed by its reliance on materiality. This paper stems from a project that explores the place of spirituality in everyday life through insights from Spiritualist churches and their congregations. Whilst evidence of Spiritualist locations can be partially obtained through documentary records, a key challenge has been in understanding practices in the context of Spiritualism’s disassociation with materiality and the centrality of Spirit. The paper concludes that retracing Spiritualism’s past, and capturing its contemporary spiritual practices, uncovers a ‘memory of place’ that is not only in constant transience, but that can only be known through Spirit.