posted on 2014-10-01, 10:49authored byRhys Dafydd Jones, James Robinson, Jennifer Elizabeth Turner
In both capital-P Politics, such as spectacular world events, and the ‘little-p’ politics
of everyday practices, absence and presence have been and continue to be particularly
potent political tools, utilised to reinforce particular power relations,
narratives and control over space. Absence, for example, has a long association
of denying others’ claim to spaces, places and participation. Whether excluding
particular ethnic groups from certain residential areas (Anderson, 1987), young
people from shopping centres at particular times (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008)
or homeless people from urban regeneration sites (Katz, 2001), making absent
has been used as a stratagem of control that removes dissenting views and experiences
from particular time/places. In short, it demarcates territory where acts,
people and ideas cannot belong. Similarly, the opposing part of the binary, presence,
has traditionally been used to emphasise deviance. Schivelbusch (1995)
has shown how, in the development of the modern metropolises of London,
Paris and Berlin, artificial illumination was used as a means to give ‘presence’
to misdemeanours and criminal acts which were previously concealed by
shadowy and darkened spaces. For Foucault (1977), the body of the condemned
served as a warning to others of the consequences of their transgressions, creating
a ‘spectacle of suffering’ (Spierenburg, 1984). In both these cases, fixing unwanted
attention on the body was a way of installing discipline both to the perpetrator
and to the gazer. Both absence and presence, in this sense, have been used as
methods of social control; through a mixture of writing-out and constructing a
spectacle, they denote what belongs where and when: what is in place, and
what is out of place (Cresswell, 1996). [Opening paragraph]
History
Citation
Space and Polity (Special Issue : between absence and presence : geographies of hiding, invisibility and silence), 2012, 16 (3), pp. 257-263
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE/Department of Criminology
Version
AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Published in
Space and Polity (Special Issue : between absence and presence : geographies of hiding