Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present

Marín, Louis

doi:10.1086/448680

Cited by 59 publications

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“…The term ‘spatial play’ is derived from the geographically‐infused work of philosopher‐ semiotician Louis Marin (). The phrase appeared to him one day as he peered at the city of Chicago from the observation deck of the Sears Roebuck tower.…”

Section: ‘The Ends Of Europe’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The phrase appeared to him one day as he peered at the city of Chicago from the observation deck of the Sears Roebuck tower. Descending to ground level, Marin marvelled at two sets of postcards: one, he reports, ‘recalls the prospect [visitors] have discovered from the top floor of the building … the plain stretching away as far as the eye can see, the others … the [other] views of the tower from the ground at a distance’ (Marin , p. 397). For Marin, the ‘spectator's eye’, looking down from a dominant position, occupies an altitude so that ‘his [sic] gaze “collects” a space that he “really” totalizes, the plain up to its extreme frontier’ (Marin , p. 398).…”

Section: ‘The Ends Of Europe’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Descending to ground level, Marin marvelled at two sets of postcards: one, he reports, ‘recalls the prospect [visitors] have discovered from the top floor of the building … the plain stretching away as far as the eye can see, the others … the [other] views of the tower from the ground at a distance’ (Marin , p. 397). For Marin, the ‘spectator's eye’, looking down from a dominant position, occupies an altitude so that ‘his [sic] gaze “collects” a space that he “really” totalizes, the plain up to its extreme frontier’ (Marin , p. 398). Rather than perceive these perspectives as antagonistic opposites, Marin suggests we apprehend the two ‘visions of the world’ revealed by the postcards as ‘all together at the same time and moment of thinking’; the ‘opposition as such’ would reveal for him a visually decisive emblem of the ‘frontiers of Utopia’, understood as (1) the frontiers that limit utopia if such frontiers ‘really’ exist, and (2) the frontiers that any utopia traces if any utopian is capable of tracing such frontiers.…”

Section: ‘The Ends Of Europe’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For Marin, the very contemporaneity of the utopian frontier and its horizons is put back on the agenda since 1989 with the opening up of the East as a ‘great void’, concomitant with Fukuyama's ‘end of history’ and ‘end of ideology’ theses. The collapse of the Communist Utopia, according to Marin, ‘allows the return of Utopia itself in the shape of its first apparition at the beginning of the sixteenth century in Europe with the great explorations and travels’ (Marin , p. 406). The opening of this ‘strange apeiron ’ in the early modern period signals at the same time the emergence of new terms such as ‘ Lisiere , the indefinite, horizon’, their semantic network constituting today the ‘chance of Utopia just as in the past’ (Marin , p. 411).…”

Section: ‘The Ends Of Europe’mentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘Spatial Play’ at the Ends of Europe: Oyapock Bridge, Amazonia

Kramsch

2016

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

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Drawing on the work of philosopher-semiotician Louis Marin, this contribution to Outlook on Europe reveals the 'spatial play' of contending outlooks hovering fitfully over the construction of a bridge at the 'ends of Europe', in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, on that very spot where French Guiana and Brazil, the European Union and Mercosul, physically touch one another over a muddy tributary, the Rio Oyapock. The inter-play of visions colliding around the Oyapock bridge, it is argued, illuminates the paradoxes and contradictions of European territorial governance in the globalised time-space of its postcolonial frontiers. In spite of the high geopolitical rhetoric seeking to unite both continents, the peculiar blindness of Europe's metropolitan gaze vis-a-vis indigenous difference sets the stage for perverse effects of exclusion and disempowerment in and around the site of the bridge itself, extending far into its regional hinterlands. Framed against the backdrop of a long, 'utopian' modernity of European imperial expansion and territorial conquest, the ghostly spatial dynamics surrounding the Oyapock River bridge project serve to illuminate wider challenges to the projection of EU influence 'in the world'. A close examination of similar dynamics elsewhere may help bring into focus the lineaments of a more fully confident and mature postcolonial European border studies.

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Section: ‘The Ends Of Europe’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ‘The Ends Of Europe’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ‘The Ends Of Europe’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ‘The Ends Of Europe’mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

‘Spatial Play’ at the Ends of Europe: Oyapock Bridge, Amazonia

Kramsch

2016

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

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“…A similar paradox of the policed borderlessness of utopian spaces was theorized by Louis Marin as the sign of both the beginning and the end of modernity. 7 As a coda, I consider responses to the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Mirrors: Reception of the Israeli Wall in the German Media, 2003-2004

Bikard¹

2011

German Politics and Society

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In what way does national history shape the interpretation of international events in that country's media? Germany has always had a particularly sensitive and complex relationship with Israel. The Holocaust left such a scar on German identity that the country cannot consider Israel without confronting its own history. In Israel, Germany sees a "reflection" of its own historical and symbolic space. In this article, I draw together a close reading of major German newspapers with more interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives in order to illuminate the mechanism of what I call "mirror reading," and especially to reveal its workings during what I consider a key shift in the discourse on German identity. The German print media, which I treat as the activating agent in German narration of national identity, plays a central role in this reflection by projecting national symbols onto Israel. In particular, I identify the initial reception of the Israeli wall (2003)(2004)) as a turning point in the debate on German self-understanding after the Holocaust. I establish that there are two extremes in a continuum of how German national history can frame the Israeli wall, one making Germany an active agent and the other a passive one. Employing national symbols in the media distorts the domestic perception of foreign events. My study casts a first light on this little understood-but nonetheless crucial-phenomenon.

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(Post‐)Cartographic Urges: The Intersection of Museums and Tourism

Staiff¹

2015

The International Handbooks of Museum Studies

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This quite particular mediation explores some of the ways museums and tourism have become entwined theoretically and the circumstances whereby the ontological distinctions between them collapse. The chapter explores a tourist‐centric notion of the museum as a “destination” for sightseeing and pleasure by examining the museum through the lenses of recent tourism theory, particularly theory that can be broadly understood as having a twinned locus, mobilities and performance. Recent tourism theorization reminds us that the museum doesn't precede the tourist – awaiting their arrival – but is brought into being in the experience. This goes beyond cartography, and yet the map and the exhibition plan continue to choreograph movement and performance though now one conceptualized as highly improvised, with a locus in embodiment. To paraphrase Elizabeth Grosz, outside objects, monuments, buildings, and so on are inside bodies.

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Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present

Cited by 59 publications

References 0 publications

‘Spatial Play’ at the Ends of Europe: Oyapock Bridge, Amazonia

‘Spatial Play’ at the Ends of Europe: Oyapock Bridge, Amazonia

Reading Mirrors: Reception of the Israeli Wall in the German Media, 2003-2004

(Post‐)Cartographic Urges: The Intersection of Museums and Tourism

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