Souvenirs, salvage and storied things : remembering community.

What I am talking about comes from a much larger set of projects with a number of collaborators so I will be ventriloquising along the way today. What effect does it have if we take that supply chain and value chain and take it even further, into the after life of things. And I am thinking about the Tales of Things of Electronic Memory. Lets extend the social biographies. Lets look at the movement in and out of the commodity phase. Not just ending as commodities and having use-value, but becoming commodities again then stopping being commodities again and so on. So this is a story that is also about circulation from stocks of objects. Things that we hold idling in our house, our wardrobes and things which are held in hiding by the state that we will come on to and many things that are circulated and how they made to circulate. A large part of the story is about things and about changing things in order to rekindle value. How do you take something which has no value let in it, no worth if you want to put it in those terms, and rekindle that, recreate worth from it? So this is dealing with consumption, not just consumption in terms of using, as context as Irene would says, but also as using up, consuming in that sense, finishing it. So I want to tell some stories about remainder objects; the things which are left over, or actually remainders of objects. What happens when the object themselves have got used up during consumption? And find their story map of object destruction, about actually using things until they have gone, until they have broken. So to continue that cheery theme of death and destruction, I thought I would just illustrate this in a few quotes in terms of things and objects. I will start with Robert Smithson’s take on this. The conceptual artist of the 1960s and 70s in the United States, with his comments: ‘separate forms, objects, shapes are mere convenient fictions. There is only an uncertain disintegrating order that transcends the limits of rational separations.” Now he does not acknowledge it, but basically he lifted that from Henri Bergson, who was summarsied by Bertrand Russell as being about being as flow: “separate things, beginnings and endings are mere convenient fictions: imaginary congealings of the stream” and of course we can take this back further to Heraclitus or Lucretius or if we want back to someone like Gautama Buddha's final words: “It came as if in all composite things, everything ends up breaking, everything ends up being destroyed.

Time : space

Spaces of Geographical Thought examines key ideas like space and place - which inform the geographic imagination. The text: discusses the core conceptual vocabulary of human geography: agency: structure; state: society; culture: economy; space: place; black: white; man: woman; nature: culture; local: global; and time: space; explains the significance of these binaries in the constitution of geographic thought; and shows how many of these binaries have been interrogated and re-imagined in more recent geographical thinking. A consideration of these binaries will define the concepts and situate students in the most current geographical arguments and debates. The text will be required reading for all modules on the philosophy of geography and on geographical theory

Temporal ecologies: multiple times, multiple spaces, and complicating space times

It has become rightly de rigeur for critical geography to talk of spacetime as linked together. What the papers gathered here also show is that this handy linking into one term is, if useful and important, also, in some ways, a chaotic conceptualisation. In one sense this is because space and time interact in a multitude of ways—whose complex patterning this theme issue does so much to illustrate. In a rather deeper sense it is because the terms space and time actually convey many different senses. The question this collection of papers raises is what kind of ‘time’ is seen interacting with what kind of ‘space’ when we talk of spatiotemporal geographies. What kinds of times, what kinds of spaces, and what resulting timespaces do we see in these critical geographies? The timing and placing of events often reveal issues of power and inequality for sure. But I want to suggest we can see in these papers how power is etched into the kinds of times and spaces that organise events and through which events unfold. If it is commonplace to follow Lefebvre’s (1991, page 334) argument that social confl ict and power are not just a matter of social relations and contradictions in space but of space, then the same must apply to time and by extension the forms of timespace

Pollen Tube Plugs in Lychnis Alba

Author Institution: Department of Biology, Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio 4550

Illicit economies: customary illegality, moral economies and circulation

This paper is concerned with how to think the illicit and illegal as part of economies. Economic geography has only recently begun to address this challenge but in limited ways. The paper shows the difficulties with those approaches, chief among which is a reassertion of the legal/illegal binary of products and actors that is contested by the more open term illicit economies. We draw on work in cultural economy to move economic geography beyond this impasse by seeing economy as practice. The paper develops a conceptual account of illicit economies connecting moral economy and the opacities produced by logistically complex global trade to highlight the importance of customary illegality in doing business. Customary illegality is the tolerance or practice of illicit activities by largely legal economic actors rather than just a focus on illegal goods or criminal actors. Illicitness is thus shown to be neither a property of goods nor of particular economic actors, but rather a transient quality often linked to circulation. The argument is illustrated empirically through three examples drawn from the food sector. The conclusion makes suggestions for future research that are empirical, methodological and conceptual