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Spatial textures : place, touch and praesentia.

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  • Kevin Hetherington
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<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2003
<mark>Journal</mark>Environment and Planning A
Issue number11
Volume35
Number of pages12
Pages (from-to)1933-1944
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

In this paper I consider the everyday ways in which people make place through touch. Beginning with discussions with visually impaired people about their experiences of museum places, I seek to offer a more general understanding of the coconstruction of place and subjectivity through the role of touch. Touch produces a form of confirmation of the subject - world at the interface between the materiality of that world and the hand. Such an encounter is understood not as initially meaningful and representational to a subject who is distinct and distally knowledgable about the world, but as constitutive -- through a proximal encounter with the praesentia of a place, which is both present and absent -- of the subject itself. As such, I aim to contribute to ongoing debates around the themes of performativity and nonrepresentationalist knowledge within geography.