Symbolic space
memory, narrative, writing
pp. 323-337
in: Gary Backhaus, John Murungi (eds), Symbolic landscapes, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
The important principle to draw from this chapter is that spatial enactment is the necessary source for cognitive understanding. Spatiality anchors cognitive meaning through the production of the virtual space of memory. The virtual space of memory is intertwined with actual space; without virtual memorial space we would not have experience. Rhetoric and the art of writing are spatially organized/organizing, which means that both the expression and the medium itself are co-constitutive and ambiguously both function as agencies/patients in a circular dialectic. The geographicity of remembering, forgetting, storing, misfiling, retrieving, and losing is intimately connected to, interrelated to, and mutually influential of, the geographicity of actual situations. The virtual space of memory is still an embodied space and this is a crucial point of our thesis. Both the body schema and the virtual body together form the imaginative body. The virtual space of memory requires participation of the body schema. The orator, for example, must ghost gesture walking through the rooms of his virtual house in order to enact his speech. Thus, the geography of the imagination provides an enactive geography of walking through rooms, which is then translated into the oration of a speech. Once again, we recognize the fundamental importance of geographies of the imagination to cultural/humanistic geography.