Mediations in Cultural Spaces

Book excerpt: The essays collected in this volume address the cultural and intellectual production of space. Cultures under discussion may be identified at a general level according to notional designations of East and West and range from those of Iran, Turkey, Western Europe and the United States. While the interests, orientations and methodologies of the individual contributions are diverse there is a general tendency to forgo official national and regional discourses of social space in favour of discussions exploring the material and intellectual conditions according to which cultural entities come to see themselves as spatially located and/or dislocated. To this end, this volume brings together philosophical, historical and critical interpretative treatments of virtual space, architecture, music, sculpture, literature, religion, advertising, politics and the cyberspace of the new media. Space is variously conceived in terms of the radical imaginary, metaphor, irruption, intensity, mimesis, ontology, the materiality of the earth, power and emancipation. There is expressed the conviction in these essays that interdisciplinary and eclectic approaches, combined with sustained and critical reflection on concepts of space, contribute to an understanding of space as radically mobile.