Abstract
Taking as its starting point the spatiotemporal rhythms of landscapes of hyper-mobility and transit, this paper explores how the process of “marooning” the self in a radically placeless (and depthless) space—in this instance a motorway traffic island on the M53 in the northwest of England—can inform critical understandings and practices of “deep mapping”. Conceived of as an autoethnographic experiment—a performative expression of “islandness” as an embodied spatial praxis—the research on which this paper draws revisits ideas set out in JG Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island, although, unlike Ballard’s island Crusoe (and sans person Friday), the author’s residency was restricted to one day and night. The fieldwork, which combines methods of “digital capture” (audio soundscapes, video, stills photography, and GPS tracking), takes the form of a rhythmanalytical mapping of territory that can unequivocally be defined as “negative space”. Offering an oblique engagement with debates on “non-places” and spaces of mobility, the paper examines the capacity of non-places/negative spaces to play host to the conditions whereby affects of place and dwelling can be harnessed and performatively transacted. The embodied rhythmicity of non-places is thus interrogated from the vantage point of a constitutive negation of the negation of place. In this vein, the paper offers a reflexive examination of the spatial anthropology of negative space.
Highlights
Hurtling headlong across the motorway, taking strategic advantage of a brief lull in the traffic flow, my goal was to maroon my self in a space defined in opposition to those routinely inhabited or imagined: a negative space against which the more mundane geographies of everyday mobility might be cast and measured
Concerned less with arrival and departure in terms of the consummatory passage through a space or non-place of transit, the experiential space–time of the island is more redolent of an embodied sense of stasis: a temporal unfolding of spatial restriction where movement is defined in relation to the immobility and longueur of the liminal “pause” ([9], pp. 82–83; [10], p. 5)
Time Out offers an immersive illustration of the capacity of motorway non-places to effect a
Summary
Marooned in an office block or on a traffic island, we can tyrannise ourselves, test our strengths and weaknesses, perhaps come to terms with aspects of our characters to which we have always closed our eyes ([1], p. viii). Concerned less with arrival and departure in terms of the consummatory passage through a space or non-place of transit, the experiential space–time of the island is more redolent of an embodied sense of stasis: a temporal unfolding of spatial restriction where movement is defined in relation to the immobility and longueur of the liminal “pause” The non-places of the motorway, in other words, refer to both the anthropologically inert or “empty” spatialities of the built environment and the “other spaces/places” of the imagination that the mundane roadscape [29] helps conjure into being. Time Out offers an immersive illustration of the capacity of motorway non-places to effect a “spacing out” of some of the more mundane facets of everyday life and to render possible the creation of “other worlds”: spaces of the imagination into which the self can take temporary flight. Referred to here as “deep mapping”, how exactly might, or should a project such as this be labelled?—what it does point to is a praxis of the self as a fundamentally creative act: an embodied practice of what the geographer David Crouch [35] refers to as “spacing”
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