FORTHCOMING FROM PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
A NEW BOOK BY PHIL COHEN
MATERIAL DREAMS : Maps and Territories in the un/making of Modernity
The book takes the reader on a journey into the intellectual borderlands of the human sciences. Starting from Korzybski’s famous dictum that the map is not the territory it develops a critique of both sociological realism and poststructuralism as accounts of their articulation. Moving from the history of cartography to autobiography and ethnography, Material Dreams argues for an alternative epistemology, underpinning a method of interdisciplinary research which can get to grips with the deeper, more unconscious ways in which individuals and groups map and make sense of the world while staying closely in touch with the material histories of the specific cultures and communities to which they belong.
In the second part of the book this approach is applied to studies of cultures which exist in the interstitial spaces between official maps drawn by panoptic social science or political governance and the territories of what Freud called the ‘other scene’: the uncannily familiar and the uncommonly strange. This is where the other class, other ‘race’, other gender, all those ‘on the other side of the tracks’ live, haunt and sometimes disrupt the dominant common sense, becoming objects of public fear and fascination on the way. It is also where academic orthodoxies and rationalist pedagogies of Enlightenment fear to tread.
Chapters deal with the hidden history of masculinity and manual labour; contemporary cultures of working-class childhood and youth; landscapes of ruin and the depiction of war; and the processes of urban fabrication set in motion by the Olympics . Across these various instances a story is told about how the unfamiliar, the uncommon, and the unknown not only unsettle the fictive concord between map and territory but give material dreams of prosperity, progress and social peace their purchase on the sociological imagination of modernity. The implications of this analysis for re-grounding critical theories in the everyday practice of democratic politics are drawn out, drawing on examples from the authors own work over twenty years in the schools and neighbourhoods of the working class city.
CONTENTS
Introduction: The eclipse of Modernity or why the map is not the territory
In which we review recent debates on modernity in relation to the changing landscape of class, gender, generation and ‘race’ in Britain and suggest why the spatial turn in the human sciences is connected to a pervasive loss of trust in our ability to map the past, the present and the future.
Part I: Maps
Chapter One: On Navigating the Uncanny
In which we explore the quest for modernity through the history of cartography, from Mercators projection to Google Earth, examine some recent attempts to valorise locally situated knowledge in and against the globalised space of networks and flows and ponder the fascination of the Uncanny in the age of the sat nav.
Chapter Two : Dwelling places: Some reflections on the Origins of Narrativity
In which we consider what memoirs have to teach us about the nature of story telling and its relation to a more hidden curriculum vitae and consider different grammars of autobiography as strategies for re-locating the self in a world whose borders are continually shifting.
Chapter Three: Showing, Telling and Getting Real: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography
In which we consider some of the problems of method which arise when we try to understand cultures as maps rather than territories and explain why ethnographers need a theory of mimesis and masquerade to get real with the worlds they explore.
Chapter Four: Thinking Places : On Disciplines in Dialogue
In which we explore changing regimes of scholarship in the age of the knowledge economy by way of very short histories of the library, the study and the laboratory and engage contemporary Academic debate on social epistemology and inter-disciplinarity by imagining what a ‘university of the third space’ might look like.
Part II: Territories
Chapter Five: There Goes the Labourhood: Hidden Formations of Masculinity and Manual Labour from Pre- to Post-Industrial Capitalism
In which we explore a terror incognita of labour history, discover that the English working class has two bodies, one with a white skin and the other wearing a black mask, meet mummers, miners and sweeps, find out whatever happened to manual culture and why Bob the Builder can’t fix it.
Chapter Six: The Playgrounds of Prejudice and Other Tales out of School
In which we see what happens when critical ethnography hits the streets of the working class city, following in the tracks of young people in east London as they tell more or less tall stories which variously magnify issues of ‘race’ and ethnicity or cut them down to size but either way show why the rhetoric of multiculturalism is as bankrupt as ‘community cohesion’ when it comes to understanding what is at stake in their lives.
Chapter Seven: Landscape after Ruins: Prospects of War and the Unconscious Refuge
In which the reader is taken on a journey to the dark side of the moon, visits scenes of danger and devastation in the company of landscape painters and photographers committed to the sublime or the picturesque, sits in on a child therapy session at the Hampstead War Nursery and ends up at the Acropolis with Freud to find out what this archaeologist of the fractured psyche did not see amidst the ruins.
Chapter Eight Material Dreams : adventures in a post- Olympic City
In which the reader accompanies the author as he digs beneath the surface of the Olympic Dream and discovers the avatars of modernity in the process of urban fabrication taking place in London East 20.
Endnotes
Glossary and Further Reading
To be published by Palgrave Macmillan in the Autumn of 2014
