GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining Toronto
Department of Geography
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
York University
Winter Term 2011-2012
Week 10
Class Fictions:
(1) Dwelling and Poverty
(2) Narratives of Work in Toronto Literature
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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(1) Dwelling and Poverty
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Toronto the Good:
“Every city has a self-image, and
every city’s self-image is almost
precisely a representation of what it
is not, what it is least.”
John Seeley, The Underside of Toronto (1970: 9).
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“In Toronto poverty is not exactly a
crime, but it is sufficient of an
inconvenience to make everyone
very desirous of not possessing it.”
C.S. Clark, Of Toronto the Good (1898: 27).
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“Toronto is a long street with doorways
that cost too much to enter.”
Andrew Pyper, Kiss Me (1996: 125).
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“The City of Toronto defines homelessness
as a condition of people who live outside,
stay in emergency shelters, spend most of
their income on rent, or live in
overcrowded, substandard conditions
and are therefore at serious risk of
becoming homeless.”
City of Toronto, 2003. Toronto Report Card on Housing and
Homelessness
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“Scripting” Homelessness
• Marvasti (2001) argues that social workers
“script” narratives of homelessness to maximize
“service worthiness;” e.g., to facilitate access to
shelter, food and other services.
• Underpinning these narratives is a “discourse of
morality” inherited from 19th century narratives of
the “deserving poor.”
• Allen (2001) argues that literary narratives of
homelessness typically take two forms: (1) the
quasi-heroic narrative of the wandering
vagabond; or alternately, (2) the degraded
victim.
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Literary “Scripts” of Homelessness
1. The Degraded Victim:
• Stories that ‘rehabilitate’ their protagonists by
making them seem sympathetic, even heroic
and thus deserving of advocacy and assistance.
• Scrimger’s ex-doctor, Helwig’s brilliant
schizophrenic, Shields’ beloved daughter
2. Heroic Rebellion:
• Aubert’s disgraced former judge, living as a
“citizen of the kingdom of free reign.”
• Bishop-Stall describing his homeless colleagues
as “vagrant celebrities, the nobility of the
bums.”
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Images of Homelessness
•
•
•
•
White or Aboriginal
Mentally ill
Male
About 1/3 of Toronto’s homeless population is estimated to
be in need of psychiatric help (Daly, 1996).
• However, the conditions of homelessness – extreme
poverty, social isolation, hunger and exposure to the
elements – contribute to or exacerbate symptoms of
mental illness.
• Moreover, a policy of de-institutionalizing psychiatric inpatients without providing adequate community support
has also increased the “visible homeless” population.
• Problems like this are what led Cap Capponi to describe
Parkdale in Last Stop Sunnyside as “a dumping ground for
alcoholics, drug addicts, ex-cons and de-institutionalized
mental patients.” GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
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7 March 2012
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
Hidden Narratives of Homelessness
• What of the “undeserving poor,” long-term alcoholics, excons, hustlers, shills and con-artists?
• In many cases they are simply written out of the narrative.
Some exceptions; e.g., Ted Plantos’ The Universe Ends at
Sherbourne & Queen.
• Data on homelessness in Toronto indicates that people
who become homeless are disproportionately likely to
have grown up in poverty, experienced domestic
violence, self-identity as Aboriginal, suffer poor physical
and mental health, battle addiction or have spent time in
prison.
• Increasingly, homeless populations also include women,
children and racialized minorities.
• Causes and effects?
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“It is a city that burrows, tunnels, turns underground.
[…] Even the homeless and the outcasts travel
downwards when they can, into the ravines that
slice around and under the streets, where the
rivers, the Don and the Humber and their
tributaries, carve into the heart of the city; they
build homes out of tents and slabs of metal
siding, decorate them with bicycle wheels and
dolls on strings and boxes of discarded books,
with ribbons and mittens, and huddle in the cold
beside the thin water.”
Maggie Helwig, 2008. Girls Fall Down (2008: 7).
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“Derek Rae’s life in the ravine is, after its manner, a
life well organized. His time is measured by the
regular catastrophe of the trains passing over his
head, thunderous and dirty, an assault of noise.
The days and weeks are shaped by weather, the
poison sun and debilitating humidity of late
summer shading slowly into the long cold nights
and the sheltering snow. [...] Though Derek is
radically isolated, he is not in fact quite without
human contact. He is known to the street nurses,
for instance, who bring him the bottles of water
and tins of Ensure that now constitute his entire
diet.”
Maggie Helwig, Girls Fall Down (2008: 149).
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“None of this represents the truth of Derek’s
existence, his passions and his miseries, the
battles he wages all alone against pains and
fears and the forces of universal gravitation. The
raw courage that is required of him every day.
His hard-won choice to continue living, when so
many possibilities to stop are offered at every
hand, the cars on the highway, the trains on the
tracks, an end to the daily loss. None of this
represents Derek’s soul, scraped bloody,
howling, fighting always to hang on, a solitary
superhuman ordeal, unacknowledged by the
world, unrewarded.”
Helwig, 2008: 149-150.
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“A photograph in winter: the street nurses make
their way up a snowy slope of the Rosedale
ravine, carefully, sleeping bags under their arms,
the emissaries of the comfortable world, toward
an improvised tent, toward people who live
without comfort. Another photograph: a very
thin, aged man, surrounded by piles of plywood,
his few possessions, a notebook in his lap, on the
banks of the Don. His name is Fred. “I’m not
homeless,” he says, fists clenched in
determination. “This is my home.”
Maggie Helwig, “Downward.” In HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake
Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-Flow Toilets (Coach House,
2008:180-181).
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“Some afternoons the musician sat in the coffee shop
muttering, a short pencil in hand, scribbling musical notes
onto a tattered fragment of a brown paper bag. He kept a
worn leather folder of music under one arm, sometimes
shifting it to the inside of his grungy coat, sometimes to the
table, then back to his armpit. .[...] Oku came out of the St.
George subway one day, and as he walked toward the
university, he saw the musician sitting on a concrete
embankment, his leather folder in his lap, his large hands
making a gesture of piano playing. Oku slowed his pace,
trying to avoid another unpleasant encounter. But he saw
that the musician was heedlessly playing his symphony.
His face was a beautiful mask of pleasure, his long fingers
lustful on some arpeggio.”
Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (2005: 170-172).
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“Like every story you ever heard, this one is about
the teller. I am a vagrant. A voyager, a
wanderer, a citizen of the kingdom of free reign.
[…] That May I was living in a large packing case
partially roofed with stolen tar paper and snugly
nestled under a tree in the middle of a wood that
could not be reached except by foot or horse.”
Rosemary Aubert, Free Reign (1997: 1-2).
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“I loved the river even here. I loved how dark it was, how it
held its secrets with the dignity of the damned. I loved how
grass and even small trees managed to sprout out of the
concrete that held it captive. …. I loved the sounds, even if
they were the sounds of man rather than the sounds of
nature. I loved the rattle of the old bridges as the
streetcars went over them. I loved the lap of the water as it
licked at concrete. I loved the wind in the slim weeds that
grew between the railroad ties. I even loved the sound of
the rush-hour trains, the buzzing traffic, the sound of my
own feet on the asphalt path. I think what I really loved in
those moments when I was cupped in the hand of the city
was life.”
Aubert, 1997: 104-105.
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“Like a first year sociology student I keep coming
back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I know
there are five levels, and that the first must be
something like food, water and shelter, because
that’s what I work at all day. But the second?
Human contact, a good book and pinball? The
third, I guess, is the stuff you get jailed for: fast
cars, cocaine and kisses that end in a sunlit
morning by the sea. Above that would be
enlightenment, an Academy Award and true
love. And then finally, I guess, redemption.”
Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, 2004. Down to This. Toronto: Random
House.
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7 march 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“While others slip into the shelters, we’re building
our own houses with our hands. While they crowd
around the TV in a community centre, we’re
stoking the fire barrel, watching sparks rise like
new stars in the cold night. They’re under a
blanket of rules, and we’re making up our own
then tossing them off with a laugh. Some of them
keep it tough—they live alone beneath viaducts
and bridges. But we live together on the banks of
the river and the lake. We’re fought each other,
and we’ll fight each other again. But not just
now.
Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, Down to This (2004: 83).
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“I learned not to stare at the haunted men and
women who would rummage through public
garbage receptacles that had already been
picked through half a dozen times before, in
search of food or some discarded treasure. And I
wouldn’t stand open-mouthed, staring at those
who, like pigeons swooping down on crumbs of
bread, grabbed up cigarette butts from gutters
and sidewalks, straightening up long ones and
immediately lighting them, the shorter ones
going into torn pockets for later.”
Pat Capponi, Last Stop Sunnyside (2006: 56).
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“I’m not crazy, you know. I spent a
few years on the streets, and maybe
I was yelling, but I was never crazy. I
was just confused, wondering where
everyone had gone, my family, my
friends.”
Pat Capponi, 2006. Last Stop Sunnyside. Toronto: Harper Collins.
Week 10
7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Philosophical Perspectives on
Homelessness: Raymond Koukal
“Within this closeness that is dwelling in the polis I
encounter, more and more frequently, those
which do not dwell. I find that the homeless “jut”
into my environment, without belonging to it. [...]
On the same pavement where I walk they scuttle
out of where they do not belong to another
location where they do not belong, and every
gesture of their mortal bodies reveals their
resignation to not belonging.
Koukal, 1996. Discrete Environments: Those Which Do Not Dwell.
International Studies in Philosophy, 28(2): 63-73.
Week 10
7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“Those of us which dwell swirl in eddies about the
homeless, not indifferent, not concerned, not
solicitous, but disturbed. We respond either with
something like negation or something like
charity, but in either case these confrontations
disrupt our environment because we have
encountered something out of place,
something-we-do-not-know-what-to-do-with.
Koukal, 2006: 69.
Week 10
7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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(2) Narratives of Work
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Description of a foundry owner, circa 1908:
“A typical member of the wealthy class who lives
in luxury off the sweat of his employees and then
lays them off as if they were useless things if
there’s the least dip in his profits. […] There would
be no wealth without our work. Ten hours a day
they work us, and look at what you put up with
on the killing floor. What for? So men like Mr.
Flavelle can live a life of luxury.”
Judi Coburn, 1998. The Shacklands (Toronto: Second Story Press: 4041)
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“The clock was on the wall behind her. She daren’t turn and
look again. The boss had shouted at her the first and last
time she’d looked. That seemed an eternity ago, and even
then her feet were numb. Now sharp pains ran across her
shoulders and down her back. If she twisted her head to
relieve the pain in her neck, she jostled the girl beside her,
who glared silently but ferociously.
[…]
Filthy floors. Dust in the air so thick it made Katya cough until
she spat up blood. And just yesterday there was Anna,
fired when a sewing machine needle ran through her
finger and blood stained the sleeve she was sewing.”
[Barbara Greenwood, 2007. Factory Girl. Toronto: Kids Can Press.]
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“One evening in October the newspapers printed extra editions
reporting a stockmarket crash. Of all the city's neighbourhoods
Cabbagetown probably took the news most quietly. In the
wealthier districts, and even in the middle-class neighbourhoods,
the citizens were shocked or sloughed off the news as merely a
temporary halt to the inevitable spiralling of the economy. ....
Cabbagetown went on its serene way, not caring whether the
stockmarket crashed or didn't, such things being as far away and
as alien to Cabbagetown as an aeroplane crash in Peru. With
millions of dollars worth of investors' paper profits blowing away
on the autumn breeze Cabbagetown knew that its hard-earned
wealth was safe. Come Friday night or Saturday noon the same
familiar pay envelopes would be carried out to the shipping
platform by the foreman or handed through the timekeeper's
wicket as usual. Whether some stock-market plungers lost their
fortunes or whether a particular stock was worth this or that was of
no particular interest. As a matter of fact most Cabbagetowners
felt rather smug about the whole thing.” (Garner, 1969: 36)
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7 March 2012
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“The panic wasn't over as soon as the optimists
predicted, and over the next few months its
results began filtering down through business
and industry, and even into Cabbagetown itself.
Business said it had to retrench, and it began to
cut its staffs relentlessly, and cut the pay checks
of those who were retained in their jobs.”
Garner, 1969. Cabbagetown: 39.
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“The soap was manufactured, flaked and boxed by mechanical
means; but Ken was the missing link in the technological
manufacture and distribution of soap flakes, for as yet there was
no machinery in the plant to mechanically take the boxes from
the chutes and pack them into cartons. Why should there have
been when Ken was young, agile and had perfect eyesight
which could discard broken boxes, did not have to be oiled or
repaired and could work a fifty-five hour work week without
breaking down.
[....]
Sometimes Ken would remove the gauze mask that he, along with
everyone else in the room, wore in place of the non-existent
ventilating system, and shout obscenities back at Trenton [the
foreman], hiding them behind a beatific smile. Trenton, who was
slightly deaf, saw the smile but did not hear the words. [....] To
relieve the overpowering monotony of the job he acquired the
habit that sustains all such workers, of allowing his thoughts to
escape into the world outside the factory walls.” (Garner, 123124)
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“[T]he efficient workers reach their destinations
quickly and easily while the malfunctioning
workers end up maimed, mangled or dead.”
[Rabindranath Maharaj, 1997. Homer in Flight. Fredericton, NB:
Goose Lane.]
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“Framed by the dim interior of the stand [at Queen’s Park] a man
leaned hatless, straw hair coxcombed by the wind, shouting, “...
Work ... Name of the single unemployed of this Province ...
Fullscale program ... Union wages ...” The wind, and the honk and
squeal of traffic, shredded his sentences, which in any case
came jerkily, slowly, from the swaying figure. “Twenty cents a
day ... Starvation ... Bennett government ... Slave camps ... Winter
....” Kin a ragged topcoat buttoned to the neck he rocked, beat
on the railings with bare fists. “Organize ... Bosses ... Mass action
...” Above him a canvas banner bellied: WORKLESS UNITE – JOIN
PROTEST MARCH TO CITY HALL MONDAY.”
[....]
“The back if the long line was suddenly convulsed with struggling
figures; the police had converged, batons flashing. ... A thin little
man charged back toward them, brandishing a spindly placard,
but the nearest policeman brought a baton down with a long
swing; the thin man clutched his had, staggered, sagged to the
grass.” (Earle Birney, 1955. Down the Long Table. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart: 52-54).
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“I’ve seen the working stiff being kicked around all over the
North American continent. .... You don’t even have to go
anywhere outside this town to see that the system is rotten
and has broken down. Right here in good old Tory British
Toronto you have the same problems they have anywhere
else. Just because I don’t use Commie words like ‘labour
power’, petit-bourgeois, or ‘surplus value’ doesn’t mean I
can’t see what’s wrong. I’m just not interested in your new
civilization or your new religion or your new politics, or
whatever the hell it is. I’m just interested in pork chops for
the poor, jobs for those who want to work, bugless beds
and free hospitalization.”
Hugh Garner, Cabbagetown (Toronto: Ryerson Press, [1973] 1969: 279)
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•
•
•
•
In Emily Schultz’s Toronto novel, Heaven is Small, the imperative to work
and the desire to create works are pitted quite literally against one
another. Gordon Small, a failed writer who has died without noticing the
event of his own passing, travels to suburban Don Mills to apply for a job
as a proofreader at Heaven, the world’s largest publisher of romance
fiction. In methodical order he is appraised, interviewed, employed and
assigned a cubicle in the pink ocean of the Editorial department at
Heaven, where he reads and copyedits romance manuscripts for eight
hours a day.
As the weeks pass, Gordon realizes that he and his colleagues are dead,
and that working at Heaven represents some sort of afterlife limbo.
The significance of Heaven’s working conditions is not lost entirely on
Gordon’s colleagues, one of whom inventories Heaven’s reliance on
nineteenth century Taylorist labour management practices, observing
that their work lacks intellectual content, tasks are mechanized,
routinized, simplified and fragmented, and even their wages are
calculated to keep them compliant.
“Coercion outweighs consent,” Gordon’s co-worker declares, adding, “a
bona fide industrial plant stands above you, my friend … the wheels of
romance turn with Fordism.” Schultz, 2009. Heaven is Small. Toronto:
Anansi: 93-94.
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“At times I’m certain I’m being groomed for something higher up,
but as I have only hazy notions of the organizational structure of
Seymour Surveys I can’t imagine what. The company is layered
like an ice-cream sandwich, with three floors: the upper crust, the
lower crust, and our department, the gooey layer in the middle.
On the floor above are the executives and the psychologists –
referred to as the men upstairs, since they are all men – who
arrange things with the clients; I’ve caught glimpses of their
offices, which have carpets and expensive furniture and have
silk-screen reprints of Group of Seven paintings on the walls.
Below us are the machines – mimeo machines, I.B.M. Machines
for counting and sorting and tabulating the information; I’ve been
down there too, into that factory-like clatter where the operatives
seem frayed and overworked and have ink on their fingers. Our
department is the link between the two: we are supposed to take
care of the human element.”
Margaret Atwood, 1969. The Edible Woman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
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“Because our department deals primarily with housewives, everyone
in it, except the unfortunate office-boy, is female. We are spread
out in a large institutional-green room with an opaque glassed
cubicle at the end for Mrs. Bogue, the head of the department,
and a number of wooden tables at the other end for the
motherly-looking women who sit deciphering the interviewers’
handwriting and making crosses and checkmarks on the
completed questionnaires with coloured crayons, looking with
their scissors and glue and stacks of paper like a superannuated
kindergarten class. The rest of us in the department sit at
miscellaneous desks in the space between. “
Ibid.: 14.
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“What, then, could I expect to turn into at Seymour
Surveys? I couldn’t become one of the men
upstairs; I couldn’t become a machine person or
one of the questionnaire-marking ladies, as that
would be a step down. I might conceivably turn
into Mrs. Bogue or her assistant, but as far as I
could see that would take a long time and I
wasn’t sure I would like it anyway. “
Ibid.: 20.
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“I realize every office has its share of assholes, but
in the newsroom the proportions seemed all out
of whack. Most offices, I’ve found, break down
something like this: 5 percent of the people are
cool or “allies,” 10 percent are assholes; and the
other 85 percent are indifferent, neutral. But in
the Cosmodemonic crackhouse, it was more like
5 percent cool people; 85 percent assholes; and
10 percent real fucking assholes.”
David Eddie, 1996. Chump Change: 195.
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Canadian Experience
• Toronto’s new working class: part-time service
sector workers, a population composed
disproportionately of recent immigrants and
racialized minorities.
• This working class is largely invisible.
• Its members are disproportionately likely to be
injured on the job, less likely to be unionized, less
likely to enjoy health and other employment
benefits.
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“Some say that life imitates art. For the “immigrant”
in these stories there is no life and there is no art.
There is no “life” because they do not live freely
nor with any semblance of mutual, creative
relationships. The “immigrant” is merely living.
“How are things, man?”
“Living, man. I just here, living.”
[Austin Clarke, 1986. from the Introduction to Nine Men Who
Laughed. Toronto: Penguin.]
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“Braving the punishing cold, you beat the
footpaths, searching for vacancies. You do
Yonge Street, then Bloor, Dundas, and Queen,
the East End, then the West. Taking refuge in
donut shops, using precious change to make
phone calls doomed by the first word, the
accent. I am a salesman, I was a salesman. Just
give me a chance. Why don’t they understand
we can do the job? “Canadian experience” is
the trump they always call against which you
have no answer.”
[M.G. Vassanji, 1991. No New Land. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.]
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“He would carry the newspapers to the basement,
turn to the classified sections and gaze
apprehensively at the Help Wanted ads. The
entire process depressed him. […] Canadian
degree … previous Canadian experience
required … Canadian accent required …
Canadian experience preferable … Ontario
letter of standing required.”
[Rabindranath Maharaj, 1997. Homer in Flight. Fredericton, NB:
Goose Lane.]
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“In the eight years he had spent in this country, he had lain
low for the first five, as a non-landed immigrant, in and out
of low-paying jobs given specifically to non-landed
immigrants, and all the while waiting for amnesty. One
year he worked distributing handbills, most of which,
because of boredom, he threw into garbage pails when
no one was looking, and laughed, until one cold afternoon
in February when his supervisor, who did not trust
immigrants, carried out a telephone check behind his
back, only to discover that none of the householders on
the fifteen streets he had been assigned to had ever heard
of or had ever seen the brochures advertising Pete’s Pizza
Palace, free delivery.”
[Austin Clarke, 1986. “Canadian Experience.”]
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“Let’s see, do you have ten years’ driving
experience?”
“Ten years? I’ve only been in the country ten
days.”
“Ten’s the requirement. Years, days, what does it
matter to me? Ten’s good enough.”
“But…”
“Do you know every single street in this city?”
“Not a single street.”
“That’s good enough for me, too. That’s how I
started. You’re hired.”
[Ansari Ali, 1992. The Sacred Adventures of a Taxi Driver. London,
ON: Third Eye.]
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Geographies of Work I:
Marxist Perspectives on Labour
• “We inhabit the space-time of capital.” (Gidwani & Chari,
2004)
• In this view, spaces – including literary spaces – are
produced and reproduced by the flows and circuits of
capitalism.
• What are the spatial consequences of a system that turns
labour into ‘abstract labour’? Does space also become
‘abstract’? (according to Lefebvre, yes!)
• How can we ‘play’ with this ultimately spatial metaphor?
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Work and Alienation
• Marx argued that all work is devalued under the alienating
conditions of industrial capitalism, which (1) reduces
workers to automatons, (2) separates working people from
the products of their labour, (3) pits workers against one
another as a class and (4) estranges them even from the
core of their own essence.
• For a fuller discussion of work and alienation, see James
Reinhart’s The Tyranny of Work (1987: 14-16).
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
46
Labour, Production, Place
• Marxist political economy and ‘radical geography’
• Begins with the assertion that space is socially produced, and
that socially produced space is a ‘historical’ (more specifically,
economic) phenomenon: materialism.
• According to Marx, industrial capitalism operates through circuits
of capital. Surplus value (profit) is extracted from workers. The
logic: material inputs are relatively inflexible (and therefore can
produced only a fixed volume of profit) but workers are
supremely flexible.
• Surplus value is also extracted from space: the labour process is
also a spatial process.
• David Harvey describes capital as “value in motion” – it travels
through phases in the circuits of capital, which manifest spatially.
• As capital travels across space and time, it transforms those
spaces and is transformed by them.
• In this sense, spaces are said to be socially produced.
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
47
Lefebvre on Spaces of Capital
• “Logico-epistemological space … the space of
social practice, the space occupied by sensory
phenomena, including products of the
imagination such as projects and projections,
symbols and utopias.” (1973: 11-12)
• L-E Space is actually subsumed within the forces
and relations of production under capitalism:
space as traditionally experienced is actually
disappearing. Huh?
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
48
Lefebvre’s hypotheses about space
1.
2.
3.
4.
That physical (natural) space is disappearing and has been
reduced to mere background décor and nostalgia
That every society (and every mode of production) produces its
own space
If space is a product, then our knowledge of space reproduces
and expounds the process of production – through (1) social
practice, (2) representations of space, and (3) representational
spaces)
Space is historical: the shift from one mode of production to
another entails the production of a new space
Lefebvre posits that there are three kinds of space: (1) absolute
space (historical), (2) abstract space (space under capitalism)
and (3) representational space (spaces of difference, naïve but
revolutionary).
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
49
Lefebvre on Social Space
• “Representational space” is effectively
superceded – even killed off – by industrial
capitalism
• Social space (space under capitalism) is
simultaneously exaggerated and reduced to
spaces of capital (production and consumption)
• People, things, and places are “replaced, slowly
but implacably, by products destined to be
exchanged, traded and reproduced ad infinitum
…” (Lefebvre, p 74)
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
50
Contemporary (Capitalist Spaces)
• On modern cities, Lefebvre writes that
“everything here resembles everything else”; he
adds that “repetition has everywhere defeated
uniqueness, that the artificial and contrived have
driven all spontaneity and naturalness from the
field, and, in short, that products have replaced
works. Repetitions spaces are the outcomes of
repetitive gestures.”
• Spaces have been reduced to the visual, to
spaces of spectacle, to images available to be
bought, sold, produced and consumed in an
endless cycle
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
51
Some examples …
• City form that privileges spaces of production (factories,
business districts) and physical structures that ease their
flow (transportation networks, roads, airports)
• Work-space design: the physical organization of work to
support mass production (the geography of your workplace)
• Temporal flows organized around work-leisure.
• Space-time compression (David Harvey)
• Mass cities = mass production and mass consumption
• “banalization of space” (Guy Debord): space as spectacle
• Alienation?
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
52
How does literature respond to capitalism?
• Literature as a mirror: Passivity, complacency,
consumption, spectacle
• Literature that exposes or conceals class divisions
• Literature that resists spatial alienation
• Literature focusing on spatial transgression
• ‘working class’ literature
• Literature as disposable (genre fiction? Bestsellers?)
• Note that space is far more than a passive industrial setting
• Note also that the labour process is also a spatial process
• Again, though, we have the problem of voice: who speaks
for whom? Are the voices of the working class merely
appropriated by bourgeois writers?
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
53
Working-class writers “seek to portray a pace of
activity controlled by machinery, supervisors, or
a time clock. They attempt to reproduce the
boredom of sameness, of mindless repetition, of
humans acting as machinery. Their challenge is
to portray a place where individuality is not only
not valued, but suppressed. They seek to portray
the consequences of living, hour after hour, with
such suppression.”
(Christopher & Whitson, 1999: 73-74)
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
54
What is working class literature?
• Working class as: blue-collar wage-earners.
• Working class literature as being narratives “written by workingclass people about their class experience.”(Christopher &
Whitson, 1999)
• Life at the level of “raw survival” (ibid): starvation, waiting,
oppression, exclusion, and resistance. Distrust of authority. Class
identity. Crisis.
• Challenges of these definitions: Must the categories involve a
binary opposition? Are all workers members of the “working
class”? Are all workers “class-conscious”? What about (the large
mass of) bourgeois literature about the working class? Must all
working-class literature be heroic or revolutionary? Can workers
ever be content, or must the literature explore themes of
alienation and oppression? Do workers seek to transcend or
celebrate their class position?
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
55
Geographies of Work II:
Phenomenologies of Work
• There are remarkable similarities between the Marxist
critique of capitalism and phenomenological encounters
with work and alienation.
• Much turns on how we define “work’.
• Work and alienation: Hegel; Marx; Heidegger; Scott
Shershow (the ‘double necessity’ of work); Hannah Arendt
• Work as inextricably linked with the project of Being.
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
56
The Question Concerning Technology
• Heidegger on the essence of modern technology: that it
reduces nature and human beings to “standing reserve …
ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed
to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further
ordering.” (from The Question Concerning Technology)
• But where Hegel’s concept of alienation focuses on the
collective spirit, and Marx’s concept of alienation focuses
on labour, Heidegger’s concept of alienation focuses on
being.
• “techne”: a bringing-forth, an arising of something out of
itself, a revealing, a gathering of essents (things) together
• Technology, in contrast, is not a bringing-forth but a
challenging-forth, in which energy is extracted and stored.
• Spatial implications: spaces are ordered; movement
becomes coerced; nature is trammeled.
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
57
Spaces of Alienation
• Heidegger on the “homelessness of modern
man”; our failure to dwell
• Marx on flexible spaces
• Lefebvre on the disappearance of
representational space
• Harvey on space-time compression
• Debord on the ‘banalization’ of space
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
58
Sites of Representation: the Labouring City
• The lived experience of work
• Centres and peripheries, margins, seams, edges
• Shifts in urban form, travel, mobility, temporal
change, domestic space
• Spaces of opportunity, belonging, inclusion and
exclusion, interiority/exteriority
• Analyses of race, sex, class: class fictions
• How does class play out in the city’s literature?
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
59
Work-spaces in Garner
• The worker’s vanishing in space: two narratives
(how might we extend this analysis to visible and
invisible labour in contemporary Toronto?)
• Resistance as spatial practice
• How is the city carved up by production? How is
it reconstituted? What is included or left out?
• How do networks of production and
consumption flow?
• What might a map of work in Toronto look like?
How would we represent work spatially?
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
60
Work and Works
• In The Work and the Gift (2005) literary scholar Scott Cutler
Shershow describes the “double necessity of work” as a paradox
that arises from the imperative to perform the obligatory labour
that sustains our material existence despite deriving the bulk of
our identity from the parallel impulse to build, craft or otherwise
create works with intrinsic value, such as a hand-knit scarf, a
literary masterpiece or a well laid wall.
• This tension, arguably inherent in human endeavour, turns
destructive whenever works are subsumed beneath the demands
of work.
• In distinguishing works from work, Shershow belongs to an
intellectual tradition stretching from Hegel (who emphasized the
transcendent qualities of work performed in the creation of
works) to Hannah Arendt (who distinguished work, as an end in
itself, from labour, or work as a means to an end).
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
61
Week 10
7 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
62